Defense Solutions Gets Defensive About Forgery
Allegations

post from TPMMuckraker on 08 July 2008 02:10:00 PM. © TPMMuckraker

We've previously followed some of Sharon Weinberger's coverage at Wired on former Representative Curt Weldon's ties to shady arms-dealings. Weldon, a defeated Republican from Pennsylvania was employed as Chief Strategic Officer for Defense Solutions after losing his election in November 2006.

Lost in the holiday weekend traffic was a Wired story on the Pennsylvania based arm dealer's multiple contracts, potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars, to corner the supplier market from Eastern Bloc countries to to Iraq. The deals, which the magazine describes as "often legally murky" were brokered by Weldon, who is currently under investigation by the FBI for corruption stemming from his work in Congress.

In an update yesterday, Weinberger expanded on Defense Solution's claim that they had an exclusive deal with Ukraine to supply their armored vehicles to Iraq. The boast was bolstered by a signed letter from Ukraine's Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Andri Veselovsky, to the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Stephan Minikes.

Defense Solution's CEO, Tim Ringgold, bandied the letter about as proof of their relationship -- that is until Veselovsky told Wired the letter was a fake, and that it wasn't his signature. Now Ringgold seems to be taking it all back.

In an update on Weinberger's Wired blog DANGER ROOM:

Timothy Ringgold, the CEO of Defense Solutions wrote DANGER ROOM to express some objections with this post. His letter, with our answers, follows......
Ringgold writes: Your article of July 7, 2008 11:07 a.m. has a number of significant inaccuracies, not he least of which deals with your allegation of forgery:
As I informed you during our phone conversation, I have no knowledge of a "letter" from Ukraine's Deputy Foreign Minister, but I am aware of an email dated February 25, 2008 received from the Deputy Foreign Minister. Since I spoke with the Deputy Foreign Minister after receiving it, I think it safe to conclude the email was genuine.
[DR: The forgery allegation is not ours; it is Veselovsky's. He stated quite clearly it is not his signature on the letter. When asked about the Veselovsky letter during the interview, Ringgold acknowledged it, until he was told the Veselovsky denied signing it.]

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efensive.php

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Progressive Book Club

post from Moue Magazine on 08 July 2008 02:05:17 PM. © Moue Magazine

From my inbox:Dear progressive book lover,Have I got a deal for you! Seriously, we finally have a book club to call our own.Please consider joining the Progressive Book Club. Their book incentive to get your attention is pretty darn good: Three books[...]

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Temper Fi

post from AMERICAblog News| A great nation deserves the truth on 08 July 2008 02:04:00 PM. © AMERICAblog News| A great nation deserves the truth

John McCain lectures a vet about how his question is wrong because only people who served have the right to question McCain's judgment. Yeah, good try, except the guy is a vet. You introduced him as a vet. So you don't get to brush his question off by claiming that you know better because you served and he didn't. You can just see McCain's temper rising. Rather than answer the question, he just kept repeating how he has a perfect voting record on military issues. The vet claims McCain is lying about that perfect voting record. Fact checkers anyone?

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Uprisings: Bottom Up and Top Down

post from TPMCafe on 08 July 2008 02:01:00 PM. © TPMCafe

I think it was the British comedian Alexei Sayle who used to do this routine riffing off of Tracy Chapman's song about revolution. He'd play it for awhile, and then stop it suddenly right when Tracy was singing "there's a revolution coming." And he'd shout, in a very uppercrust accent, "No, there's not!"

I thought about that when I read David's post, but he's the guy that's been going around with his ears close to the ground, and he's got very acute hearing for this kind of thing. So if says something is percolating, I believe him.

Lord knows people have great reasons to be very unsatisfied with the status quo, and I don't just mean the current state of affairs. It's not just that we're mired in war, our benighted markets are failing (think recession, income distribution, financial meltdown, underpricing environmental damage), and so on. It's that the status quo offers no clear way out.

Though uprisings are by definition grass rootsy, at some point, government solutions are invoked, and this is what I'd like to comment on in this post. To telegraph the punchline: a key challenge facing progressives interested in real change is fixing government failures.

Think back to your own involvement in movements. Over the years, I've agitated for union rights, animal rights, immigrant rights, gun control, voting rights, abortion rights, and so on. In every single case, we were advocating for government intervention.

I was younger then, and I basically thought that if our movement was successful, government could pass a law that would fix things. Now, I know it's not that simple.

David is obviously writing about bottom-up uprisings, in many cases, movements that are a reaction to government failure. But in my experience, these groups eventually are demanding that the government alters its policies. So we've got to think on both bottom-up and top-down tracks.

And the problem for the top-down track is that government is in big trouble. I'm speaking at the federal level, but let's not get to romantic about local cases. I haven't seen much evidence that Albany works that much better than DC.

There are lots of reasons for this, but certainly one of the main ones is that if you elect people who explicitly prophesize that government is the problem, they will fulfill that prophecy with a vengeance. And yes, they'll enrich their cronies along the way.

The problem cuts deep into the agencies. Do you have any idea what the Labor Department has been doing, or not doing, over the past eight years? It is truly, deeply scary. They've been failing to enforce basic labor standards regarding wages, overtime, worker classifications, and safety and health rules? What about the Justice Department; EPA, Consumer Safety? The depth of dysfunction is astounding, and it's going to take years to repair.

David reminds us that our country was founded partly on "the right of the people to alter or abolish" destructive government. I'm in the "alter" camp, and I'd like to hear someone with David's insights and movement experience hold forth on what it's going to take to get there. What steps ought we be taking now that will ultimately give progressive uprisings a public conduit through which their goals can be achieved?

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Bush fixes Thomas Jeffersons thoughts on the 4th
of July

post from Crooks and Liars on 08 July 2008 02:00:58 PM. © Crooks and Liars

On Friday, to help honor Independence Day, the president appeared in Charlottesville, Virginia, and hosted a naturalization ceremony at Monticello. Bush had quite a bit to say about the president who called Monticello home.?The principles that Thomas Jefferson enshrined in the Declaration became the guiding principles of the new nation. And at every generation, Americans [...]

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C&L Book Chat: Outright Barbarous by Jeffrey
Feldman

post from Crooks and Liars on 08 July 2008 02:00:13 PM. © Crooks and Liars

click to order bookOne of my favorite sites for really taking a deeper look at the way information is disseminated to us is The Frameshop by Jeffrey Feldman. He quickly cuts through the spin and finds the key little phrases upon which your attitude about an event or news story is subtly couched. Jeffrey’s [...]

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Every Human Has Rights.

post from The Osterley Times on 08 July 2008 01:57:00 PM. © The Osterley Times

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This is a speech given by Nelson Mandela about the Elders--a group of World Leaders (such as Desmond Tutu, Kofi Annan and Jimmy Carter) who've come recently together to help resolve conflicts. To learn more, please go the Every Human Has Rights website and read about it there.

It would help enormously if you would also sign the petition.

Tags: Every Human Has Rights, Nelson mandela, Desmond Tutu, Kofi Annan, Jimmy Carter, The Elders

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"Going Green" With Patrick

The following appeared in the Bucks County Courier Times today?

There are too many families in Bucks County who are having a hard time coping with the price of gas. When one has to make a decision to cut down on food versus buying gas just to get to work, there is a problem. It's immoral that Exxon Mobil is making record profits while almost everyone I know pays more than $100 a week for gas just to get to work. The company made $40 billion in 2007 ? the largest profit of any company in American history. Two more oil companies announced they had made $17 billion in the first three months of 2008. I'm glad that Patrick Murphy, our congressman in Bucks County, has taken a hard line on these oil companies. Murphy voted to repeal the subsidies to big oil companies and wisely invest the money in renewable energy.

It's clear that innovation will be the key to breaking our dependence on foreign oil and driving down oil costs. It is simple economics ? oil is a fossil fuel that cannot be replenished. As we run out of oil and demand continues to grow, the price will go up. The idea that we can address gas prices by finding more gas is short-sighted and dangerous. Murphy's focus on creating green energy will help boost our economy and help protect families from struggling with out of control gas prices.

Anthony C. Badessa
Northampton, PA

To help Patrick, click here.

And by the way (speaking of energy), T. Boone Pickens has a full-page ad in the New York Times today describing how we can supposedly end our addiction to foreign oil under his plan.

I hope he doesn?t welch on his promise about this as he did here.

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Can A Citizen Breaking No Law Trespass On Public
Property

(Dept. of You Just Can't Make This Shit Up Fast Enough)

Ask the chubby, officious, pushy little McCaint operative/motherfucker who's making the objection and trying to shut up a legitimate citizen remark.
I wouldn't vote for that murderous maggot, McCaint, to suck runny dog-shit through a flavo-straw--if that were a public, rather than a corporate (VP for Corporate Accountability) office...

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What law did the lady break? What peace did she disturb? How the FUCK does a citizen who is not breaking any law trespass on public property? I hope that lady knows somebody at the ACLU.

O, by the way: You CANNOT tell me the cops don't drill to the official Fascist Pig March. We learned this in the '60s: Cops = Pigs. They work for the Regime, always...

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Olympic Opening Ceremonies: To go or not to go

post from BuzzFlash.org - Progressive News and Commentary with an Attitude | Fight Ignorance: Read BuzzFlash on 08 July 2008 01:45:59 PM. © BuzzFlash.org - Progressive News and Commentary with an Attitude | Fight Ignorance: Read BuzzFlash

Sen. Barack Obama effectively criticized President Bush Monday, by saying, if he were president, he would not attend the Olympic opening ceremonies next month in Beijing as the situation stands. He would only attend pending progress between the Chinese government and the Dalai Lama. He has previously mentioned the genocide in Darfur and China's economic interests as another concern the country would need to address before he would consider attending. Sen.Bookmark/Search this post with: buzzflash | delicious | digg digg | technorati Technorati Tags: Be-Elected Obama Bush Olympics China