Right Wing Provacateur at Smithsonian Clash

Robalini's Note: Though RawStory points out few followed Howley as he tried to rush into The Smithsonian, that hardly frees him from the charge he was an agent provacateur. Just because the rest of the protestors were smart enough to not enter a national museum and do damage, that appears to be precisely what Howley was trying to incite. He was hoping to inspire vandalism of one of America's national treasures and discredit the entire anti-war and Occupy Wall Street Movement...

Editor admits to ‘infiltrating’ D.C. protest to undermine ‘Occupy’ movement
Eric W. Dolan
Sunday, October 9, 2011
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/10/09/editor-admits-to-infiltrating-d-c-protest-to-undermine-occupy-movement/

An assistant editor for the conservative magazine The American Spectator admitted in print Saturday to infiltrating an antiwar protest in Washington, D.C. in hopes of undermining the “Occupy” movement.

Patrick Howley — “for journalistic purposes” — was one of the antiwar protesters who clashed with security staff at The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum on Saturday, leading to one arrest and numerous people being pepper-sprayed.

The progressive blog Firedoglake has condemned the editor as an agent provocateur, but it is unclear if Howley actually incited the clash with security guards.

According to the conservative writer, he rushed into the museum entrance with only a handful of other protesters.

“I forced myself into the doors and sprinted blindly across the floor of the Air and Space Museum, drawing the attention of hundreds of stunned khaki-clad tourists,” he said.

“As far as anyone knew I was part of this cause,” Howley wrote, “a cause that I had infiltrated the day before in order to mock and undermine in the pages of The American Spectator — and I wasn’t giving up before I had my story.”

The “mock and undermine” portion of the article was later removed without comment after numerous media outlets, including The Washington Post, New York magazine and The Guardian, reported the story. The URL of the article was also changed.

The protest was part of the “October 2011 Stop the Machine” antiwar demonstration. The protesters planned to demonstrate against the drone exhibit at the museum.

Howley, conflating the antiwar protest with the “Occupy” movement, wondered if the “ill-defined, anti-corporate and anti-bailout protests” were dangerous, but concluded that without ideological uniformity and a willingness to boldly confront authority, the “protesters have no political power.”

Some of those in the museum demonstration were affiliated with the “Occupy D.C.” protest group that began on October 1, but the two groups have made it clear that they are separate.

Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington and the Education of a President

Monday 26 September 2011
by: Ronald Suskind, HarperCollins | Book Excerpt
http://truth-out.org/confidence-men-wall-street-washington-and-education-president/1316814812

Truthout is offering "Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President" for a minimum one-time donation of $40, or a monthly commitment of $15 or more to Truthout.

Chapter One: SEPTEMBER 17, 2010

President Barack Obama dances lightly down the four marble steps to the Rose Garden and across the flagstones to a waiting lectern. He still glides, elegant and purposeful, in that tall man’s short-step—a ballplayer returning to the court after a time-out.

Today, September 17, 2010, he has committed to putting some “points on the board,” in the sports parlance of Rahm Emanuel, his chief of staff. The president needs to show the country that he hasn’t lost his game, the ineffable confidence, the surety of stance and delivery that propelled a man with little political experience to scale cosmic heights and to realize what felt, on Election Day, like democracy’s version of the moon landing.

Through recent history, America has considered itself something of a providential miracle, a country that kept finding reasons to believe in its Manifest Destiny. That faith, sorely tested over the past several decades, found itself restored with dizzying ebullience when Barack Obama and his beautiful family stepped onto the stage in Chicago’s Grant Park as America’s First Family. It was a sensation of such intensity as to startle many across the country and around the world into believing in the promise of America, the original and long-burning beacon of the democratic ideal.

The legacy of that moment is ever more found in the lengthening shadow it casts. In the nearly two years since, Barack Obama, like an archangel returned to earth, has been forced to walk the flat land and feel its hard contours. What, if anything, it has awakened in him remains unclear—at present, he is clearly struggling to get his bearings. And yet it is impossible to see the president and not search out signs of that man from Grant Park, who strode so boldly across history’s confetti-strewn stage.

On this warm late-summer afternoon, with Congress out of session, Obama has convened the press to announce the launch of a new agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It has been designed to protect American consumers from the predations of the financial ser vices and banking industry, which over the past couple of decades has grown vast and insatiable by inventing, for the most part, new ways to market, sell, and invest in debt.

The woman standing awkwardly at Obama’s left hip, Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Warren, has become the nation’s town crier on the subject of bankruptcy and debt. In the two years since the economic crisis, she has emerged from nowhere to trumpet the story of how debt was turned into a velvety weapon, how engorged financial firms deceptively packaged it, sold it as securities, and extracted usurious profits from American consumers, especially those in America’s once-vaunted middle class. The notion of a consumer financial product agency, a freestanding, independently funded entity like the Federal Communications Commission, was originally hers, unveiled in an article she published in the spring of 2007. The truth is that no one much cared for the idea, until her unheeded concerns turned up at the center of the worst financial meltdown since the Great Depression.

So today is a long-delayed victory for Warren—almost. Somehow nothing in the Rose Garden is quite as it seems. The president praises Warren, whom he says he met at Harvard Law School, as though they are old friends. They’re not, and Warren only became a professor at Harvard Law the year after Obama graduated from it. In fact, over the past two years, while Warren has seen herself lionized on magazine covers and in prime-time interviews as a leading voice for tough, restorative reforms, the president seems to have been studiously avoiding her. Part of the problem, clearly, is that she has been acting the way people expected and hoped that man from Grant Park would.

This has caused discomfort not only for the president, but also for his top lieutenants, including the boyish man in the too-long jacket at Obama’s right hip, bunched cuffs around his shoes, looking more than anything like a teenager who just grabbed a suit out of his dad’s closet. That’s Treasury secretary Tim Geithner, looking sheepish. Only those in his inner circle at Treasury, though, can precisely read what’s behind that expression: a string of private efforts across the past year to neutralize Warren. The previous fall, Geithner huddled with top aides to develop what one called an “Elizabeth Warren strategy,” a plan to engage with the firebrand reformer that would render her politically inert. He never worked out a viable strategy—a way to meet with Warren without drawing undesirable comparisons—and so, like the president, he didn’t.

What the Treasury Department did do, unbeknownst to Warren, was embrace demands from the banking industry to create a bureau under the condition that Warren would not be allowed to lead it. But as the financial- reform bill moved to a vote in early summer, industry lobbyists were so aggrieved at the idea of an agency—they felt it unsupportable under any conditions—that they didn’t bother to call in their chits on Warren.

In fact, they played it just so. The industry managed to get the proposed agency shrunk into a bureau that would live under the auspices of the Federal Reserve, the government’s greatest mixed metaphor of public purpose and private self-regard, representing as it does the dual interests of a sound monetary policy and the health of the banking industry. Beyond that, the bureau’s rules can be vetoed by a two-thirds majority of a panel of other financial regulators—an indignity of institutionalized second-guessing known to few other agencies.

But after financial regulatory reform legislation passed in July, the prospect of Warren at the bureau’s helm quickly grew into a movement: complete with Internet write-in campaigns, online petitions, flurries of editorials, and even a viral rap video—certainly a first in the history of appointing government regulators.

Warren would seem the easiest of choices. Since his earliest days on the campaign trail, Obama had spoken passionately about restoring competent government, and with it competent regulators. With the midterm elections less than two months away, he could have used a confirmation battle over Warren to draw a much-needed distinction between his administration and those, mostly Republicans, who dared to side publicly with America’s big banks and financial firms. Warren’s celebrated ferocity looked tailor-made to revive Obama’s vast grassroots campaign network. Like an encamped army with nothing to do, the foot soldiers of the campaign had fought among themselves a bit, eaten the leftover rations, and then drifted back to private life. Field commanders still in touch with the White House signaled by midsummer that a Warren confirmation battle would rally the troops and, according to one, “at least show what we stand for.” On the other side was the financial ser vices industry, which hurled nonspecific attacks at Warren, claiming she was arrogant, disrespectful, and power-hungry. It had begun castigating Obama as “antibusiness,” a charge the industry asserts would be definitively confirmed by the appointment of Warren.

In mid-August, Warren was finally called in to meet with the president. Obama began their sit-down saying, “This isn’t a job interview.” It wasn’t. The president had already decided what he was going to do, in a managerial style that had become his trademark: integrating policy options and political prognostication into a prepackaged solution— announced before the game even started.

Combatants over a Warren nomination will never take the field. Shuffling papers on the lectern in the Rose Garden, Obama says, with a few passive locutions, that Warren will be on the search committee to find someone to run the bureau:

“She was the architect behind the idea for a consumer watchdog, so it only makes sense that she’d be the, um . . .” He stumbles briefly, as though the text is pulling him off balance. “. . . She should be the architect working with Secretary of Treasury Geithner in standing up the agency.” He adds that she’ll be an adviser to both him and Geithner and “will also play a pivotal role in helping me determine who the best choice is for director of the bureau.”

That’s basically it. None of the troops are energized, and anyone who feared the financial debacle might produce a true innovation, a rock star regulator, is left unruffled.

The press conference ends with reporters shouting as the president turns to leave. One yells above the rest, “Why didn’t you put her up for confirmation?”


A moment later the president walks from the Rose Garden to the basement of the White House. Having finished with Geithner and Warren, he strolls unaccompanied, free of handlers and Secret Ser vice, through a long subterranean hall on his way to the Situation Room.

“Hey, Alan, how you doing?” he pipes up, spotting Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Affairs Alan Krueger coming the other way. Krueger carries an additional title, held over from the nineteenth century: chief economist of the United States.

“Just fine, Mr. President,” a somewhat surprised Krueger responds.

“In fact, today’s my birthday.”

The two men stop to chat for a moment at the entrance to the White House mess. The president has grown to appreciate Krueger’s input over the past eighteen months. A Prince ton professor and frequent stand-in for Geithner at Obama’s morning economic briefing, Krueger is something of an oddity in the upper reaches of government: he’s an actual researcher. Typically, high-ranking economists do their substantive, elbows-deep research in the earlier stages of their careers. Not Krueger. Not only had he been publishing groundbreaking studies up until joining the administration in January 2009, but he had also gone so far as to commission targeted research over the past year, using Prince ton funds and resources when he found the government’s research apparatus too slow.

The current economic crisis, he felt, was too thorny and too unusual not to study with fresh eyes and first questions. Characterized by both rock-bottom interest rates and a catastrophic deleveraging spiral, the crisis defied most historical precedents from which actionable policies might be drawn. And the White House needed nothing so much as a stream of creative remedies, one right after the next.

The administration undershot the crisis, convincing itself by the summer of 2009 that the economy had turned the corner and, at the same time, recognizing that it would be a jobless recovery of stunning disparities, with restored GDP growth alongside fast-rising unemployment. In fact, internal administration projections in June 2009, when unemployment was at 8 percent, noted that joblessness would average a whopping 9.8 percent in 2010. Krueger and others began to work furiously to find innovative ways that the government might stimulate job growth. Being a close friend of both National Economic Council chairman Larry Summers, who was his graduate adviser at Harvard, and Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag, whom he mentored at Prince ton, made Krueger one of the few people to whom both of Obama’s top economic advisers deferred. All to no avail. After the stimulus bill was passed in February 2009, little else happened on the jobs front for a year and a half. Proposals were talked to death without resolution; the few that were adopted tended to lack a coherent political strategy to make them legislative reality. The day before, the Census Bureau had announced that poverty had hit a fifteen-year high. Even the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page had bemoaned that middleclass incomes dropped a stunning 5 percent between 2001 and 2009, a lost decade laying claim to the country’s worst economic performance in half a century. Unemployment stood at precisely the 9.8 percent the administration’s prognosticators had foretold.

Obama, who was at the center of this dispiriting process, tried to keep things light and breezy in the hallway with Krueger. He seemed improbably ebullient, wanting to talk.

“So, how old?”

“A little older than you,” Krueger says. “Just turned fifty.”

Obama steps back, appraisingly.

“Fifty? You’re looking pretty good for fifty.”

He means it. Krueger notices for the first time that the president, a year his junior, has really aged in office, bits of gray hair now sprinkling his crown, wrinkles growing around his eyes. Krueger is about to say, “Well, my job’s easier than yours,” but he catches himself and instead goes with “You should see me on the basketball court.” Maybe this will win him an invitation to one of Obama’s famous five-on-fives.

None forthcoming, and Obama closes it out. “So what are you doing for your birthday?”

“Going back to Princeton,” Krueger says. He’s a breath away from adding: soon for good.

He’s through with D.C. He has decided to return home a day after the midterms, exhausted for sure, but more than that, tamping down the sense of missed opportunity. As the two men part, he can’t help but wonder if Obama feels the same way. How could he not?

Waiting in the Oval Office are Jann Wenner, the founder of Rolling Stone magazine, and his executive editor, Eric Bates. They have been there for an hour, since just before the Elizabeth Warren event, waiting and preparing for an interview with the president. Rolling Stone, failing to score an Obama interview since the campaign, has nonetheless gone through a renaissance in the past two years, dealing some of the most forceful criticisms of Wall Street and Washington and the collusion between the two, with targeted shots directed at both Goldman Sachs and Obama himself.

So, for the president, today is all about forcefully answering the charge from the progressive community—and a great many independents— that what got him elected has not been evident in his governance. The administration’s strategy is to emphasize that the distance between the hopes of Grant Park and the trimmed ambitions of legislative pragmatism is not a fissure, rupture, or acquiescence, but rather the hard reality of governing in a partisan era. All the better for those words to appear in an organ of criticism, which is why Rolling Stone was chosen.

Obama enters his famous office and compliments Wenner, the stylish, aging hipster, on his colorful socks: “If I wasn’t president, I could wear socks like that.” Then he settles himself into a wing chair between marble busts of his heroes, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Obama is ready to rebut criticisms head-on. But the questions today do not pose much of a challenge, beginning with standard fare about the state of the economy he inherited and Republican obstinacy that, the president notes, reared up a day before his inauguration even, when he learned that the Republican Caucus would vote as a bloc against the stimulus package, even though it included tax cuts and other features they’d asked for.
Fifteen minutes have passed before he gets the first tough question, about how his “economic team is closely identified with Wall Street and the deregulation that caused the collapse.”

The president gives a revealing response, noting that while Tim Geithner and the proud and obstreperous Larry Summers never actually worked for Goldman Sachs, “there is no doubt that I brought in a bunch of folks who understand the financial markets, the same way, by the way, that FDR brought in a lot of folks who understood the financial markets after the crash, including Joe Kennedy, because my number-one job at that point was making sure that we did not have a full-fledged financial meltdown.”

To compare Geithner and Summers to Joe Kennedy is a reach. Kennedy was so instrumental for Roosevelt in setting up the Securities and Exchange Commission because he knew Wall Street from the inside as a master operator, had made all the money he could ever need, and, crucially, was bursting with zeal to move into the public sector and never look back, even if it meant that his old colleagues from Wall Street wouldn’t invite him to dinner ever again. There has been no one remotely like this in a position of real power under Obama—especially not Summers or Geithner. The irony of Obama’s Joe Kennedy reference is that a comparable figure, in equal measures expert and unencumbered, is precisely what he has needed, and lacked. This is something Obama surely knows at this point.

There are more answers of this sort going forward: clever—respectfully acknowledging opponents’ positions, even those with thin evidence behind them, that then get stitched together into some pragmatic conclusion—but hollow. With today’s Warren announcement also part of the broader counterattack on progressives’ criticisms, the president then unabashedly champions Warren, speaking as though he has named her head of the bureau. A light bit of chat about Paul McCartney and the Obama girls closes out the lengthy (hour-and-change) interview. Obama bids the visiting journalists adieu and leaves to confer with aides outside the office.

Then suddenly he’s back, enlivened and ready to say something—as if the person the journalists had sat with for the last hour in the Oval Office was not the person he’d intended for them to meet.

“One closing remark that I want to make: It is inexcusable for any Democrat or progressive right now to stand on the sidelines in this midterm election. There may be complaints about us not having certain things done, not fast enough, making certain legislative compromises. But right now, we’ve got a choice between a Republican Party that has moved to the right of George Bush and is looking to lock in the same policies that got us into these disasters in the first place, versus an administration that, with some admitted warts, has been the most successful administration in a generation in moving progressive agendas forward. The idea that we’ve got a lack of enthusiasm in the Democratic base, that people are sitting on their hands complaining, is just irresponsible.”

He continues, passionate, punching the air, throwing some jabs at 527s and the Roberts Court, which had freed companies to spend at will, without disclosure, as political actors, leaving Democrats heavily outspent in the current midterm campaign. Then he brings it to a crescendo.

“We have to get folks off the sidelines. People need to shake off this lethargy, people need to buck up. Bringing about change is hard—that’s what I said during the campaign. It has been hard, and we’ve got some lumps to show for it. But if people now want to take their ball and go home, that tells me folks weren’t serious in the first place.”

The speech he’s referring to “during the campaign” was witnessed by only a few hundred people. It was the darkest moment of his run, in early October 2007, after an American Research Group poll put him 33 points behind Hillary Clinton, with only three months to go until the all-important Iowa Caucus. Obama gathered his National Finance Committee, the campaign’s top givers, in the auditorium of a Des Moines hotel for a do-or-die meeting. He explained to them that they were running a different kind of campaign, a genuine from-the-bottom-up, grassroots effort, that it had never been done before, not like this, and that it took time for those roots to take hold. The heavy hitters nodded: fine, they understood the concept. But it wasn’t working. The dispiriting national polls were one thing, but a recent Des Moines Register piece had Obama running third in Iowa.

Obama listened to them air their doubts for an hour or so before responding. Then his gaze, filled with the flinty resolve of tough love, swept over the crowd.

“Did you think I was kidding when I said this was the unlikely journey? I never said this was going to be simple or easy. You thought this would be simple? Change is never simple. Change is hard.” He dug deep, his voice dropping to a whisper. “Listen, I know you’re nervous. I understand. But if you’re nervous, I’ll hold your hand. We’re going to get through this together. I promise we will. And if we can win Iowa, we’ll win this country.” Many of those in the room, among them not a few Wall Street financiers, cheered, moisture creeping into their eyes. They opened their wallets, one last time, giving a campaign on life support a final transfusion. Of course, he did go on to win Iowa and “win this country.”

Now Obama is in the depths again, but there’s no one’s hand to hold. No one, outside of a few people in this iconic building, understands what the past two years have held, or what they’ve revealed to this man and those gathered tightly around him.

By being himself—an alluring and inspiring self, supremely confident yet expressing humility, speaking powerfully of grabbing history’s arc and bending it toward justice—Obama became the first black president. But more and more, walking the halls of this building, he doesn’t feel like himself—someone who could bring people together, who could map common ground and, upon it, build a future.

Disputes among his top advisers have become so acute, so fierce, that the president has had to step in and mediate many of them himself. He’s not getting what he needs to manage this daunting job, and some advisers have become convinced that his lack of experience, especially managerial experience, may be his undoing; that, at a time of peril, the president may simply not be up to the demands of this moment. But his gratitude for those who’ve ushered him to power, and have walked with him through battle, gets in the way of tough love, at least with those closest to him. There are top aides he’s wanted to remove for months or even longer, but can’t seem to. He knows he should, that no organization can run without accountability.

But today, as he runs between events and interviews—struggling to square the circle between pitiless reality and high ideals that, on Election Day, allowed him to claim kinship with FDR—President Obama is feeling oddly buoyant.

In the past few days, he’s caught a break. The mayor of Chicago decided not to run for reelection. That means his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, will be seeking “other opportunities” and the president won’t have to worry about firing him.

All taken care of. Emanuel will be out by month’s end to resume his political career. Many other top advisers are now planning their exits.

After that, maybe Obama can at least attempt a fresh start, a next chapter. There’s no perch, anywhere, like the presidency, with the daily burdens of office, the weight of history—and all in a fishbowl, with the world, some of it malevolent, watching every move. Which is why a president who doesn’t feel quite like himself often portends a crisis of leadership. But change presents opportunity—always—and the ground is now shifting beneath Obama’s feet. And soon enough, the president of the United States may get a chance to resume his conversation with the men whose busts stare from the cabinet behind his favorite wing chair, looking, with icy grandeur, over his narrow shoulders.

Ron Suskind is the author "Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington and the Education of a President," a sweeping narrative about the fall of the U.S. economy, the rise of Barack Obama, and the President's harrowing battles to take his control of his White House and earn the confidence of the American people. From 1993 to 2000, he was the senior national affairs writer for The Wall Street Journal, where he won the Pulitzer Prize. He has written for the New York Times Magazine and Esquire, and is a distinguished visiting scholar at Dartmouth College. He lives with his wife, Cornelia Kennedy Suskind, in Washington, D.C.

World's Most-Visited Tourist Attractions

Source: Yahoo Travel
http://travel.yahoo.com/p-interests-40711683

No. 1 Times Square, New York City
Annual Visitors: 39,200,000

Tourists flock to New York’s neon heart for the flashing lights, Broadway shows, megastores, and sheer spectacle. Pedestrian-only areas with café tables introduced in 2009 have only made it easier and more appealing to hang out here. Times Square can even be a convenient, if chaotic, base, thanks to hotels at every price point and easy access to public transportation: subways, rails, buses, and more yellow taxis than you can count.

No. 2 Central Park, New York City
Annual Visitors: 38,000,000

New York has larger green spaces, but none is more famous than Central Park, which stretches across nearly 850 acres of prime Manhattan real estate—an oasis for both tourists and locals. You can ride in one of the famous horse-drawn carriages; check out the modest-size zoo; climb to the top of 19th-century Belvedere Castle; or take a break from pounding the pavement to sprawl on the Great Lawn, gazing at the skyscrapers above.

No. 3 Union Station, Washington, D.C.
Annual Visitors: 37,000,000

Opened in 1907, this busy station shuttles some 12,500 passengers daily in and out of the city. But it also handles serious tourist traffic: 37 million who pass through to take in the impeccably mixed architectural styles throughout the colossal building: from Classical to Beaux-Arts to Baroque. More than 70 retail outlets make Union Station a shopping destination, and it’s also a jumping-off point for many D.C. tours

No. 4 Las Vegas Strip
Annual Visitors: 29,467,000

Sin City was hit hard by the recession, but don’t bet against this legendary destination, which got a boost from the summer 2009 blockbuster The Hangover. Last year, 79 percent of tourists (29,467,000 people) chose to stay at hotels right on the Strip like Caesar’s Palace—the choice of the movie’s zany four-pack. And why not? Roll out of bed and onto the Strip to catch the Bellagio fountains in action, shop, gamble, and, of course, people-watch (which can get especially fun later at night).

No. 5 Niagara Falls, New York and Ontario
Annual Visitors: 22,500,000

Straddling the borders of the U.S. and Canada, this massive waterfall spills about six million cubic feet of water—from a height ranging from 70 to 188 feet—every single minute. While there are about 500 taller waterfalls in the world, Niagara Falls is spectacular for its sheer power. It’s also more accessible than many major falls, a short flight or drive for millions of regional tourists.

No. 6 Grand Central Terminal, New York City
Annual Visitors: 21,600,000

Unlike harried commuters, visitors take their time in the main concourse of this Beaux-Arts landmark, pausing to view its glittering ceiling painted with a map of the constellations from the night sky. There are shops and events to distract your attention, and, a level below, the historic Oyster Bar—featured on an episode of AMC’s Mad Men—serves two million fresh bivalves a year.

No. 7 Faneuil Hall Marketplace, Boston
Annual Visitors: 18,000,000

Dating back to 1742, Faneuil Hall (“the Cradle of Liberty”) once hosted speeches by such greats as Samuel Adams and George Washington. Today, the downtown marketplace has more than 100 specialty shops and eateries and occupies a pedestrian-only, cobblestone area that swarms with tourists and street performers.

No. 8 Disney World’s Magic Kingdom, Orlando
Annual Visitors: 16,972,000

The Most Magical Place on Earth is high on virtually every family’s to-do list and remains the most-visited theme park on the earth. The Kingdom’s most notable feature, naturally, is Cinderella’s castle—complete with a moat and built at special angles to appear even grander than its actual height of 189 feet. Paths branch out to classic rides (Dumbo, the Mad Tea Party) and newer additions like The Pirates of the Caribbean.

No. 9 Disneyland Park, Anaheim, CA
Annual Visitors: 15,980,000

Though not as massive as its Orlando counterpart, the original Disney park—which occupies about 85 acres of land—welcomes enough thrill-seekers to qualify as the second most-visited theme park in the world. One of its coolest rides is still Indiana Jones Adventure, careening over lava, past swarms of beetles, and under that 16-foot rolling boulder.

No. 10 Grand Bazaar, Istanbul
Annual Visitors: 15,000,000

Hand-painted ceramics, lanterns, intricately patterned carpets, copperware, gold Byzantine-style jewelry, and more eye-catching products vie for your attention within this 15th-century bazaar’s vaulted walkways. It has since expanded and become increasingly touristy, but locals, too, were among 2010’s 15 million bargain-hunters. If it all gets overwhelming, break for a succulent doner kebab or strong cup of Turkish coffee.

The Underground Base Earthquake Conspiracy

From BeforeItsNews.com:

While just the idea that earthquakes could be attacks on underground bases by nukes and/or HAARP type earthquake-prompting technologies, questions surrounding the Virginia earthquake event keep surfacing, including a massive sinkhole that appeared in the vicinity following the quake.

Even more intriguing is the fact that the only two admitted military underground base facilities in the US, besides some "storage" locations, are the NORAD facility in Colorado, and the Mount Weather underground base housing a back-up government in Virginia, nearby the US capital.

Yes, a back-up government, or so they said many years ago when it was first disclosed. Since then is hush hush, as usual.

What Is Mt. Weather?

Just 46 miles from Washington DC, a mysterious and secretive underground military base exists, located deep inside a mountain near the rural town of Bluemont, Virginia. Here lies Mount Weather, also known as the Western Virginia Office of Controlled Conflict Operations.

In March, 1976, The Progressive Magazine published an astonishing article entitled "The Mysterious Mountain." The author, Richard Pollock, based his investigative report on Senate subcommittee hearings and upon "several off-the-record interviews with officials formerly associated with Mount Weather." His report, and a 1991 article in Time Magazine entitled "Doomsday Hideaway", supply a few compelling hints about what is going on underground.

Mount Weather is virtually an underground city, according to former personnel interviewed by Pollock. Buried deep inside the earth, Mount Weather was equipped with such amenities as:

•private apartments and dormitories
•streets and sidewalks
•cafeterias and hospitals
•a water purification system, power plant and general office buildings
•a small lake fed by fresh water from underground springs
•its own mass transit system
•a TV communication system

Mount Weather is the self-sustaining underground command center for the Federal Emergency Management Agency - FEMA. The facility is the operational center of approximately 100 other Federal Relocation Centers, most of which are concentrated in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina. Together this network of underground facilities constitutes the backbone of America's "Continuity of Government" program. In the event of nuclear war, declaration of martial law, or other national emergency, the President, his cabinet and the rest of the Executive Branch would be "relocated" to Mount Weather.

Source: http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread61324/pg1
FEMA's our back-up government?

First of all, I can only assume that's a partially true cover story for a multitude of covert operations. But if even that part's true that's even scarier. How was that response to Andrew or Katrina, boys? Or the gulf oil disaster? Anybody in anybody's back pocket?

At least that explains the ineptness. Disaster exploitation is more like it. They're amassing resources for a manipulated national disaster on a scale we can't even imagine. And with dire consequences for the American people.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency

Some people have referred to it as the "secret government" of the United States. It is not an elected body, it does not involve itself in public disclosures, and it even has a quasi-secret budget in the billions of dollars. This government organization has more power than the President of the United States or the Congress, it has the power to suspend laws, move entire populations, arrest and detain citizens without a warrant and hold them without trial, it can seize property, food supplies, transportation systems, and can suspend the Constitution. Not only is it the most powerful entity in the United States, but it was not even created under Constitutional law by the Congress.

FEMA was created in a series of Executive Orders. A Presidential Executive Order, whether Constitutional or not, becomes law simply by its publication in the Federal Registry. Congress is by-passed. Executive Order Number 12148 created the Federal Emergency Management Agency that is to interface with the Department of Defense for civil defense planning and funding. An "emergency czar" was appointed. FEMA has only spent about 6 percent of its budget on national emergencies, the bulk of their funding has been used for the construction of secret underground facilities to assure continuity of government in case of a major emergency, foreign or domestic.

Source: http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread60684/pg1

OK, so what's the connection

This supposedly manipulated earthquake happened in a very peculiar location, quite close to Washington DC. According to the nuke theory people, this was a take down by forces opposing what the US/London based cabal is up to; the military and financial subjugation of the world in order to impose their new, improved wicked system, affectionately called the "New World Order".

Well, it seems equally powerful forces might be wanting to send a signal back to these unchecked overlords of darkness to let them know "we're not gonna take it".

Man, wouldn't that would be good news.

But we don't know yet. And it's doubtful we'll get any kind of disclosure of anything of that nature. Shoot, they haven't fessed up to Pearl Harbor or Vietnam, never mind Oklahoma City, 9/11, chemtrails etc...or even who the hell Obama is! Underground bases and tunnel system to house the elites and "essential personnel" during a serious catastrophe?

Are you kidding me?

Connecting More Dots

What made me think about Mt. Weather is the fact that it and NORAD are the only two acknowledged government involved underground bases in the US and they're both near where these almost simultaneous, atypically large quakes struck...

The Colorado Underground Base and Quake

An unusually large 5.3 quake hit central Colorado within hours of the big DC/Virginia quake in question. Again, this time it's a huge "defense" installation under Cheyenne Mountain operated by NORAD.

Cheyenne Mountain is a mountain located just outside the southwest side of Colorado Springs, Colorado, U.S., and is home to the Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station and its Cheyenne Mountain Directorate, formerly known as the Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center (CMOC).

Throughout the Cold War and continuing to this day, the Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center and the Cheyenne Mountain Directorate collect data from a worldwide system of satellites, radar, and other sensors and process that information in real time. Operations are conducted year-round in the Air Warning Center, Missile Correlation Center, Operational Intelligence Watch, Systems Center, Weather Center, and the Command Center.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheyenne_Mountain

Epilogue - A LOT of forces at play makes for many possibilities

Well, as always I'm just wondering.

The fact that these are two significant bases are two they do admit exist, besides a few "storage facilities", and that large earthquakes struck both within hours with strange circumstances including very unusual signatures, and then we hear claims that these were nuke attacks on underground bases....well, let's just say the jury is still out, but the important thing is it's very interesting and perhaps extremely significant.

I like to bring awareness of peripheral information when a plausible theory is put out there, especially when the knee jerk reaction is to dismiss it as "impossible". And just as it's healthy to challenge what you're told NOT to believe, it's also a very sane reaction to challenge what you are told TO believe.

There are a lot more forces at play than most people can begin to believe or realize, including not just the black-ops types of 'spy vs spy' operations continually struggling amongst themselves, but there are extraterrestrial influences way beyond even some people's imagination well at work on our planet.

Even if nukes weren't involved, when quakes happen I look for how they COULD be induced, by cosmic forces and alignments such as we're apparently experiencing with Elenin and other cosmic influences. But also the likelihood that they're being manipulated or exacerbated by the PTB-directed scientific madmen, knowing full well this HAARP-type technology exists in the hands of MANY countries and forces...

To read the whole article:

Were NORAD And Shadow Gov't Bases The Nuke/Quake Targets?
Zen Gardner
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
http://beforeitsnews.com/story/1121/374/Were_NORAD_And_Shadow_Govt_Bases_The_Nuke_Quake_Targets.html

Sneaker Con is Back

Sneaker Con is hitting NYC on June 18th!



They're heading to Miami and DC too!

MIAMI: JULY 30TH,
2011 Fieldhouse at the Bank United Center
University of Miami
1245 Dauer Drive Coral Gables, FL 33146

WASHINGTON DC: AUGUST 6TH, 2011
Atlas Performing Arts Center
1333 H Street, NE Between 13th St and Linden Ct
Washington DC 20002

New House of Hoops Opening

Hey hoopsters, another House of Hoops is opening next week, this time in Tukwila, WA. You can meet Brandon Roy too, one of the most talented point guards in the league.