And Senator Marco Rubio’s chance of winning his party’s nomination may hinge on the support of an “independent” group financed by a billionaire who has bankrolled Mr. Rubio’s past campaigns, paid his salary teaching at a university and employed his wife.
With striking speed, the 2016 contenders are exploiting loopholes and regulatory gray areas to transform the way presidential campaigns are organized and paid for.
.. Major costs of each candidate’s White House bid, from television advertising to opposition research to policy development, are now being shifted to legally independent organizations that can accept unlimited contributions from wealthy individuals, corporations and labor unions.
.. Traditionally, a candidate who waited too long to hire a campaign staff risked losing all the best talent to rival candidates. Hire too early, and the campaign’s payroll costs quickly balloon, burning through contributions that are capped at $2,700 per donor.
Iraq: Errors and Lies
The fraudulence of the case for war was actually obvious even at the time: the ever-shifting arguments for an unchanging goal were a dead giveaway. So were the word games — the talk about W.M.D that conflated chemical weapons (which many people did think Saddam had) with nukes, the constant insinuations that Iraq was somehow behind 9/11.
.. That’s because the war party didn’t want to hear anything that might raise doubts about the rush to invade. Indeed, the Army’s chief of staff was effectively fired for questioning claims that the occupation phase would be cheap and easy.
.. Never mind Jeb Bush’s verbal stumbles. Think, instead, about his foreign-policy team, led by people who were directly involved in concocting a false case for war.
.. And, who can forget the “Axis of Evil” declaration, labeling Iraq, Iran & North Korea as the Axis of Evil, then proceeding to destroy the first member on the list. To no one’s surprise the two remaining members immediately set about developing nuclear weapons. They had to know that an Iraq with nuclear capabilities could not have been invaded.
.. At the time, I did not believe Bush and I did not believe our Australian PM. But I did believe Tony Blair. It is time for Blair to admit how badly he failed so many millions of people like me. We thought he was better than that. Shame on you, Tony Blair, for still pretending otherwise.
.. I always thought that the strangest thing at that time was the almost total disdain for the UN weapons inspectors and Hans Blix. Disdain from the politicians as well as the media. The inspectors went where the CIA told them they would find WMD’s, and they always found nothing – time and again.
Surely some analyst in the bowels of the CIA must have concluded their WMD intel was dead wrong. But I imagine he or she found few higher-ups that would listen. To the contrary, the worse the intel looked, the quicker Bush and his team wanted the UN out. A few more months of inspections and even the most pure-blooded hawk would have to admit that there are no WMD, therefore no rationale to invade.
.. My (now deceased) father was a recently retired foreign service officer at the time of the debate about going in to Iraq over “WMD,” and he told me at the time there was no question that the inspectors had shown Saddam Hussein was unable to acquire said weapons and simply did not have them. He found it breathtaking that Colin Powell was willing to stand in front of the UN (and, later, news cameras) claiming the contrary as a justification for war, and smash his reputation in this way
Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers
Labbé is no stranger to fake studies. In April 2010, he used SCIgen to generate 102 fake papers by a fictional author called Ike Antkare [see pdf]. Labbé showed how easy it was to add these fake papers to the Google Scholar database, boosting Ike Antkare’s h-index, a measure of published output, to 94 — at the time, making Antkare the world’s 21st most highly cited scientist. Last year, researchers at the University of Granada, Spain, added to Labbé’s work, boosting their own citation scores in Google Scholar by uploading six fake papers with long lists to their own previous work2.
Labbé says that the latest discovery is merely one symptom of a “spamming war started at the heart of science” in which researchers feel pressured to rush out papers to publish as much as possible.
Greek Debt Crisis: How Goldman Sachs Helped Greece to Mask its True Debt
Greece’s debt managers agreed a huge deal with the savvy bankers of US investment bank Goldman Sachs at the start of 2002. The deal involved so-called cross-currency swaps in which government debt issued in dollars and yen was swapped for euro debt for a certain period — to be exchanged back into the original currencies at a later date.
.. But in the Greek case the US bankers devised a special kind of swap with fictional exchange rates. That enabled Greece to receive a far higher sum than the actual euro market value of 10 billion dollars or yen. In that way Goldman Sachs secretly arranged additional credit of up to $1 billion for the Greeks.
.. At some point Greece will have to pay up for its swap transactions, and that will impact its deficit. The bond maturities range between 10 and 15 years. Goldman Sachs charged a hefty commission for the deal and sold the swaps on to a Greek bank in 2005.