Abu Graib

What We Should Learn from Jim Cramer vs. The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart

AIG, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke, Citibank, CNBC, Cramer+Stewart, Credit Default Swaps, Deep Capture, Derivatives, Dick Fuld, Gradient Analytics, Hedge Funds, Henry Paulson, Jim Cramer, Jon Stewart, Lehman Brothers, Maria Bartiromo, Mortgage Crisis, Overstock, Patrick Byrne

::What We Should Learn from Jim Cramer vs. the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart::

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March 12th, 2009 by Patrick Byrne

What should we learn from the fact that “The Daily Show’s” Jon Stewart has in four evenings (1 2 3 and 4) exposed Jim Cramer in a way that, in any sane world, he would have been exposed a decade ago? To answer that, consider these associated facts: while the Jim Cramer constellation of journalists (Mitchell’s Media Mob) backed each other up while covering-up the subject of criminally abusive short selling by hedge funds to whom they were close, four channels of the media broke rank:

  1. Two years ago Bloomberg did a half-hour documentary that broke away from the Party Line;
  2. Liz Moyer at Forbes has covered the real issues fairly and diligently, and another Forbes reporter named Nathan Vardi took a good swipe at the story (”Sewer Pipes“);
  3. Rolling Out Magazine (”an UrbanStyle Weekly serving the African American community”) called me up a couple years ago and did precisely the fair, non-disorted interview of which the remainder of the New York financial media was entirely incapable;
  4. Now, “The Daily Show” has broken ranks by stating the obvious: there are journalists shilling for favored hedge funds.

Could the lesson be that the first news organizations that can break ranks with the Party Line are either fringe (”Rolling Out Magazine” and “The Daily Show”) or the properties of billionaires (Bloomberg and Forbes) who cannot be intimidated?

Perhaps someday, a journalist will look into the pressures that were brought on news organizations (e.g., on Bloomberg leading up to their running “Phantom Shares”). Just a few weeks ago I got the  story, again, from a journalist: “I was working on a story about naked short selling and Deep Capture. Then, suddenly I was stopped. It’s weird because I have been a journalist here for 9 years. I have built a great reputation with my editor, and have never had a story interfered with. But I got a couple months into this story, and suddenly I was stopped from above. I’ve never seen that happen before.” I replied, If you only knew how many times a journalist has said that to me in the last couple years….

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The Real Scandal That Will Bring Jim Cramer Down: The Story of Deep Capture

AIG, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke, Citibank, CNBC, Cramer+Stewart, Credit Default Swaps, Deep Capture, Derivatives, Dick Fuld, Gradient Analytics, Hedge Funds, Henry Paulson, Jim Cramer, Jon Stewart, Lehman Brothers, Maria Bartiromo, Mortgage Crisis, Overstock, Patrick Byrne

The Columbia School of Journalism is our nation’s finest. They grant the Pulitzer Prize, and their journal, The Columbia Journalism Review, is the profession’s gold standard. CJR reporters are high priests of a decaying temple, tending a flame in a land going dark.

dick-fuldIn 2006 a CJR editor (a seasoned journalist formerly with Time magazine in Asia, The Wall Street Journal Europe, and The Far Eastern Economic Review) called me to discuss suspicions he was forming about the US financial media. I gave him leads but warned, “Chasing this will take you down a rabbit hole with no bottom.” For months he pursued his story against pressure and threats he once described as, “something out of a Hollywood B movie, but unlike the movies, the evil corporations fighting the journalist are not thugs burying toxic waste, they are Wall Street and the financial media itself.”

His exposé reveals a circle of corruption enclosing venerable Wall Street banks, shady offshore financiers, and suspiciously compliant reporters at The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, CNBC, and The New York Times. If you ever wonder how reporters react when a journalist investigates them (answer: like white-collar crooks they dodge interviews, lie, and hide behind lawyers), or if financial corruption interests you, then this is for you. It makes Grisham read like a book of bedtime stories, and exposes a scandal that may make Enron look like an afternoon tea.

By Patrick M. Byrne

Deep Capture Reporter

Make a pot of strong coffee and read this incredible story

Unedited | Cramer Vs. Stewart | Part Three

AIG, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke, Citibank, CNBC, Cramer+Stewart, Credit Default Swaps, Deep Capture, Derivatives, Dick Fuld, Gradient Analytics, Hedge Funds, Henry Paulson, Jim Cramer, Jon Stewart, Lehman Brothers, Maria Bartiromo, Mortgage Crisis, Overstock, Patrick Byrne

Unedited | Cramer Vs. Stewart | Part Three

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Intro | Cramer Vs. Stewart | Unedited

AIG, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke, Citibank, CNBC, Cramer+Stewart, Credit Default Swaps, Deep Capture, Derivatives, Dick Fuld, Gradient Analytics, Hedge Funds, Henry Paulson, Jim Cramer, Jon Stewart, Lehman Brothers, Maria Bartiromo, Mortgage Crisis, Overstock, Patrick Byrne

Intro | Cramer Vs. Stewart | The Complete Interview -Unedited

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ABC News Exclusive: Dick Cheney Still Batshit Crazy

Abu Graib, Guantanamo, terrorism

ABC NEWS

Exclusive: Cheney Holds Hard-Line Stance

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In an Exclusive Interview with ABC News, Vice President Dick Cheney Opens Up About His Hard-Line Tactics

By JONATHAN KARL

Dec. 15, 2008 —

In an exclusive interview Monday with ABC News, Vice President Dick Cheney issued an unapologetic defense of the Bush administration’s anti-terror policies, including the use of waterboarding, and said the prison at Guantanamo Bay should remain open as long as there’s a war on terror.

In his first exit interview and first television interview since the November election, Cheney held fast to his views on coercing information out of alleged terrorists, saying waterboarding was an appropriate means of getting information from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind behind the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Cheney resisted those who say the Bush administration has overstepped its bounds on torture, saying national intelligence is an art, not a science.

“On the question of so-called torture, we don’t do torture,” Cheney told ABC News. “We never have. It’s not something that this administration subscribes to.

“I think those who allege that we’ve been involved in torture, or that somehow we violated the Constitution or laws with the terrorist surveillance program, simply don’t know what they’re talking about.”

Cheney was also asked whether he authorized the tactics used against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

“I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared, as the agency in effect came in and wanted to know what they could and couldn’t do,” Cheney said. “And they talked to me, as well as others, to explain what they wanted to do. And I supported it.”

“There was a period of time there, three or four years ago, when about half of everything we knew about al Qaeda came from that one source,” he added. “So, it’s been a remarkably successful effort. I think the results speak for themselves.”

Cheney also said the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks most certainly became “a prime motivation” in shaping his time in office.

“Have I changed?” Cheney asked. “Well, not in the sense that I’ve gone through some fundamental psychological transition here but I have been since that day focused very much on what we needed to do to defend the nation and I think the policies we’ve recommended, the programs that we’ve undertaken have been good program. I think those have been sound decisions and if that’s what they mean by saying I’ve changed, I’m guilty.”

Cheney Disputes Rove

The outgoing vice president also disputed former Bush adviser Karl Rove’s recent comments about the decision to go to war in Iraq.

While discussing Bush’s legacy earlier this month, Rove said he did not believe the administration would have gone to war had intelligence revealed Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction.

“I disagree with that,” Cheney said Monday. “As I look at the intelligence with respect to Iraq, what they got wrong was that there weren’t any stockpiles.”

“What they found was that Saddam Hussein still had the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction. He had the technology, he had the people, he had the basic feed stock.”

Cheney added that, given Saddam Hussein’s capabilities, reputation and track record of brutality, “this was a bad actor and the country’s better off, the world’s better off with Saddam gone, and I think we made the right decision in spite of the fact that the original NIE was off in some of its major judgments.”

Cheney Says Guantanamo Should Remain Open

Cheney said the prison at Guantanamo Bay could be responsibly shut down only when the war on terror has ended. Asked when that might be, he added, “Well, nobody knows. Nobody can specify that.”

“A lot of people, including the president, expressed the view that they’d like to close Guantanamo,” he said. “I think everybody can say we wished there were no necessity for Guantanamo, but you have to be able to answer these other questions before you can do that responsibly.”

Cheney warned that prisoners released from Guantanamo could prove dangerous to the United States, adding that the problem of what to do with released prisoners had not yet been solved.

“If you release people that shouldn’t have been released — and that’s happened in some cases already — you end up with them back on the battlefield,” he said.

Cheney said the Guantanamo detainees have been “well treated.”

“I don’t know any other nation in the world that would do what we’ve done in terms of taking care of people who are avowed enemies, and many of whom still swear up and down that their only objective is to kill more Americans,” he said.

Read excerpts from Monday’s interview here.

ABC News’ Kate Barrett contributed to this report.

Did PBS bury controversial torture documentary under pressure from Bush administration?

Abu Graib, Dick Cheney, Election 2008, George W. Bush, Guantanamo, Johh Yoo, John Ashcroft, PBS, Politics, Torture

THINK PROGRESS

Scott Horton reports today that PBS may have refused to nationally air a controversial documentary on the use of torture by the U.S. government in order to protect its funding. Previously, the Bush administration threatened to cut PBS’s funding after it aired Bush’s War, a Frontline special critical of the war in Iraq:

On Thursday evening WNET in New York will air an important new documentary by Emmy and Dupont Award winning producer Sherry Jones entitled “Torturing Democracy.” It appears on WNET and several other affiliates independently because PBS would not run the show. […]

According to producer Sherry Jones, PBS told her that “no time slot could be found for the documentary before January 21, 2009″ — the day after George W. Bush and Dick Cheney leave office.

Watch a clip from Torturing Democracy here.