DC Madam Predicted She Would Be Suicided

Paul Joseph Watson, Prison Planet Thursday, May 1, 2008

Click here to listen to Palfrey clearly state that she would not commit suicide.

DC Madam Deborah Jeane Palfrey predicted she would be “suicided” on several occasions both recently and as far back as 17 years ago - comments that now appear ominous in light of the announcement that the former head of a Washington escort service allegedly killed herself today.

“If taken into custody, my physical safety and most probably my very life would be jeopardized,” she wrote in August 1991 following an attempt to bring her to trial, “Rape, beating, maiming, disfigurement and more than likely murder disguised in the form of just another jailhouse accident or suicide would await me,” said Palfrey in a handwritten letter to the judge accusing the San Diego police vice squad of having a vendetta against her.

During several recent appearances on The Alex Jones Show, Palfrey also said that she was at risk of being killed and that authorities would make it look like suicide. She made it clear that she was not suicidal and if she was found dead it would be murder.

Palfrey had threatened to release the names of well-known clients of her upscale call girl ring in the nation’s capitol, and had indicated that Dick Cheney may be one of them.

“We now know it goes at least as high as a United States Senator,” Palfrey told The Alex Jones Show, “I’m hearing rumors now from other people that there are other possibilities in that stratosphere so to speak, on that level.”

“No I’m not planning to commit suicide,” Palfrey told The Alex Jones Show on her last appearance in July, “I’m planning on going into court and defending myself vigorously and exposing the government,” she said.

“Blanche Palfrey had no sign that her daughter was suicidal, and there was no immediate indication that alcohol or drugs were involved, police Capt. Jeffrey Young said,” according to an AP report.

Click here to listen to Palfrey clearly state that she would not commit suicide.

Click here to listen to the entirety of the last interview with Palfrey.

UPDATE: In an almost uncanny development, as soon as this article started to go viral on the Internet, Time Magazine released a story claiming that Palfrey told author Dan Moldea that she would rather commit suicide than go to jail. What a funny coincidence!

RELATED: Palfrey Considered Call Girl’s “Suicide” Possible Murder

FLASHBACK: D.C. Madame: “Big Names” May Be On Client List

Developing…

Political cartoon: G. W. Bush’s Iraq Legacy by Mike Peters

Telecom immunity: where does your Rep stand?

Where does your representative stand?

For more than five years, AT&T and other telephone companies broke the law and violated their customers’ privacy rights by sending billions of private domestic internet and telephone communications and records to the National Security Agency.

The Bush administration has been lobbying Congress to let the phone companies off the hook. But recently, the House of Representatives stood strong and passed a bill that would hold them accountable.

Enter your zipcode at StopTheSpying.org to find out how your House representative voted on the recent bill denying the telecom industry immunity for their criminal involvement in spying on the American people.

See also:

• EFF: The Case Against Retroactive Amnesty for Telecoms
• Wikipedia: NSA warrantless surveillance controversy
• American Civil Liberties Union: FISA
• Wikipedia: Legal challenges to NSA warrantless searches in the United States

Examining the Origins of America’s ‘Founding Faith’

Highly recommended. Click the first link to listen to the 39 minute interview and to read an excerpt from Steven Waldman’s book:

Fresh Air from WHYY, March 11, 2008 · Was America meant to be a Christian nation? Author Steven Waldman attempts to answer this and other questions related to America’s religious history in his new book, Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America.

Waldman is the co-founder of Beliefnet.com, a website devoted to spirituality and faith issues. In tandem with his book, Beliefnet has opened an online archive of historical documents related to the separation of church and state, and religious freedom in America.

Could Hillary Bequeath Us Our Long-Awaited Third Party?

Could Hillary Bequeath Us Our Long-Awaited Third Party?

By David Michael Green, AlterNet. Posted March 7, 2008.

…

It is almost a mathematical certainty that neither candidate can win the nomination by means of gathering pledged delegates in the months ahead. Under the proportional allocation system Democratic primaries and caucuses tend to use, a candidate has to do exceedingly well in the popular vote to realize a significant shift in delegates. It would appear that Clinton’s got some favorable states ahead, and that Obama has as many or perhaps more, unless momentum has really shifted now, after Tuesday.

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Anyhow, let’s say we end the primary season about where we are now, with Obama about 100 delegates up, and having won more votes and more states than Clinton, but with neither candidate over the magic nomination-clinching line. It would be fairly outrageous for the Clintons to seize the brass ring at that point, but they will not care in the slightest what the ramifications of their actions might be for the party or the country. The Clintons will do anything - and I mean anything - to get the presidency. This is a sickness that infects the hearts and minds of some people much more than others. Because of their own needs, most prominently a very deep-seated personal insecurity, they simply need the validation of being president, and they go after it like a heat-seeking missile headed toward a power plant.

…

Maybe it goes to the Supreme Court for resolution (you know, those nice people in black robes who gave you the George W. Bush presidency), and they decide in her favor. Most likely she employs a combination of all these gambits, and collectively they could possibly give her enough delegates for a narrow technical (and very Pyrrhic) victory.

If any of these scenarios play out, Obama should leave the Democratic Party and run as a third-party candidate. Simple as that.

It would be the morally proper thing to do, and it just might even be successful, especially in the longer term.

If this seems an improbable quest, remember that Obama’s support is quite passionate - he’s not just your standard-issue marginal political preference for, say, Joe Biden over Chris Dodd. Nor would this be some personal (and absurd) vanity project, like Ross Perot’s. His supporters would be outraged at the stealing of the nomination from its rightful owner, and they’re a motivated bunch. Black voters would feel particularly slighted, and would be likely to follow Obama elsewhere. That alone would be enough to finish off the already badly-damaged Clinton candidacy in the general election. Given this moral high ground, too, I don’t think Obama would be perceived as the Ralph Nader who gave the election to McCain. Perhaps, because of access restrictions, he wouldn’t even be able to get on the ballot in many places, except as a write-in.

In the end, I don’t think it much matters. If he can’t win in 2008, the country will be ripe for the taking after four years of John McSame. And Obama has shown us nothing this last year if not excellence in organizing skills. There’s plenty of time by 2012 to give birth to a real progressive party that has been aching to calve off from the Democrats for three decades now. If the Clintons and the Liebermans of this world want to hang tight with their DLC party of Diet Pepsi Wall Street, let them. If they feel a burning compulsion to become the Whigs of the 21st century, I for one won’t stand in the way.

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Unfortunately - really, very unfortunately - it’s an almost impossible trick to pull off given the structure of the American political system, and I have joined lots of other smarter people counseling against the effort, suggesting an attempt at hijacking the Democratic Party instead. Not for nothing was the last new major party born in America 150 years ago. It’s not an accident that for about three-fourths of the country’s history it’s been Republicans or Democrats. Period.

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(Read the whole thing here: http://www.alternet.org/election08/78973/?page=1)

Whistleblower: Cellular carrier giving FBI unfettered access

Computer security analyst Babak Pasdar says that a major mobile telecommunications carrier has a built-in backdoor that provides an undisclosed third-party with unfettered access to its internal technical infrastructure, including the ability to eavesdrop on all calls through its network. In an affidavit that describes the circumstances and basis for the allegations, Pasdar provides evidence which could indicate that the FBI is on the other side of the secret line, engaging in warrantless surveillance of mobile communications.

…

Whistleblower: Cellular carrier giving FBI unfettered access

Things done RIGHT with America’s food in 2007

The Organic Consumers Association sent out a special year-end edition of their newsletter, Organic Bytes, noting one positive development each month of 2007.  Click each link for an article detailing the accomplishments:

January:  Dozens of “Certified Organic” candidates sworn into office

February:  Field trials of experimental biotech grass halted

March:  Monsanto’s genetically engineered alfalfa banned

April:  USDA bans cloned foods from organics

May:  Consumers successfully pressure congress on country of origin labels

June:  Factory farm has organic certification yanked

July:  Congress preserves local food and crop safety laws

August:  Beer giant goes organic

September:  OCA declares victory in its “Frankenbucks” campaign

Ocbtober:  Class action lawsuit in 27 States launched against factory farms

November:  rBGH being driven off the market:  “rBGH-Free” labeling protected

December:  Massive NAIS threat to family farmers held off

The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy

This fascinating presentation aired on the “It’s Your World” radio series released by the World Affairs Council:

Originally publishing “The Israel Lobby” as an essay in the London Review of Books in March 2006, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s analysis of the Israel Lobby and its influence on U.S. foreign policy was one of the most controversial articles in recent memory. Having deepened and expanded their argument to confront recent developments in Lebanon and Iran, Mearsheimer and Walt join the World Affairs Council for a public exchange in San Francisco, where they will discuss their contention that the material and diplomatic support provided by the United States to Israel is due largely to the political influence of a loose coalition of individuals and organizations that actively work to shape U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction. They argue that this lobby has a far-reaching impact on America’s posture throughout the Middle East-in Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, and toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The discussion is available in streaming video via RealPlayer and in downloadable MP3 format. Note that the MP3 doesn’t have the correct file extension and the filename must be appended with “.mp3″ (without the quotes). The entire show is just over an our long and counts as college credit somewhere, I’m sure. It’s getting a bullet point on my resume no matter what. Either way, please take my word for it, it’s worth the time.

(For Windows computers, I highly recommend Real Alternative in place of the invasive RealPlayer, and Foobar2000 for playing all audio files. Mac OS-based systems will receive my enlightened recommendations once someone donates a MacBook Pro with 15.4″ LED LCD, 2.4GHz CPU, hologram projector and flux-capacitor at 1.21 Jigawatts.)

Consumer Reports countering drug commercials

Consumer Reports’ Health Blog has begun publishing videos in a series they’re calling “Consumer Reports Adwatch” where they will tackle claims made by pharmaceutical ads. (At least, I believe it’s just pharmaceutical ads.) The first of these covers an advertisement for RLS, or “Restless Leg Syndrome”, that ridiculous sounding ailment that drug companies made up to make a buck right after they made up “Acid Reflux Disease.”

Now, before anyone flames me for scoffing at this nonsense, please note that I learned RLS is a real illness, though rare. It’s completely different from the nervous-energy-triggered, bouncing-leg behavior someone exhibited during every minute of every class period in highschool.

Acid Reflux may be real as well and not just symptoms of the crazy modern diet. (I doubt it.) But the ads by Megapharmacorp, Inc. are propaganda, cut and dry. I’m not being naïve. I will never quit expecting people to behave ethically and scrupulous. And in this country (USA), corporations are legally people, too (more so, even).

We’re not gonna take it anymore!

Source one (PDF link); Source two

Address by Mayor Ross C. “Rocky” Anderson

October 27, 2007

City & County Building

Salt Lake City, Utah

Today, as we come together once again in this great city, we raise our voices in unison to say to President Bush, to Vice President Cheney, to other members of the Bush Administration (past and present), to a majority of Congress, including Utah’s entire congressional delegation, and to much of the mainstream media: “You have failed us miserably and we won’t take it any more.”

“While we had every reason to expect far more of you, you have been pompous, greedy, cruel, and incompetent as you have led this great nation to a moral, military, and national security abyss.”

“You have breached trust with the American people in the most egregious ways. You have utterly failed in the performance of your jobs. You have undermined our Constitution, permitted the violation of the most fundamental treaty obligations, and betrayed the rule of law.”

“You have engaged in, or permitted, heinous human rights abuses of the sort never before countenanced in our nation’s history as a matter of official policy. You have sent American men and women to kill and be killed on the basis of lies, on the basis of shifting justifications, without competent leadership, and without even a coherent plan for this monumental blunder.”

“We are here to tell you: We won’t take it any more!”

“You have acted in direct contravention of values that we, as Americans who love our country, hold dear. You have deceived us in the most cynical, outrageous ways. You have undermined, or allowed the undermining of, our constitutional system of checks and balances among the three presumed co-equal branches of government. You have helped lead our nation to the brink of fascism, of a dictatorship contemptuous of our nation’s treaty obligations, federal statutory law, our Constitution, and the rule of law.”

“Because of you, and because of your jingoistic false ‘patriotism,’ our world is far more dangerous, our nation is far more despised, and the threat of terrorism is far greater than ever before.

It has been absolutely astounding how you have committed the most horrendous acts, causing such needless tragedy in the lives of millions of people, yet you wear your so-called religion on your sleeves, asserting your God-is-on-my-side nonsense – when what you have done flies in the face of any religious or humanitarian tradition. Your hypocrisy is mind-boggling – and disgraceful. What part of “Thou shalt not kill” do you not understand? What part of the “Golden rule” do you not understand? What part of “be honest,” “be responsible,” and “be accountable” don’t you understand? What part of “Blessed are the peacekeepers” do you not understand?