Podcasts about boland amendment

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit andrewsullivan.substack.comJeffrey Toobin is a lawyer, author, and the chief legal analyst at CNN, after a long run at The New Yorker. He has written many bestselling books, including True Crimes and Misdemeanors, The Oath, The Nine, and Too Close to Call, and two others — The Run of His Life and A Vast Conspiracy — were adapted for television as seasons of “American Crime Story” on the FX channel.You can listen right away in the audio player above (or on the right side of the player, click “Listen On” to add the Dishcast feed to your favorite podcast app). For two clips of our convo — why the Bragg conviction helped Trump, and the origins of lawfare with Bill Clinton — pop over to our YouTube page.Other topics: growing up in NYC as the only child of two journos; his mom was a pioneering TV correspondent; his dad was one of founding fathers of public television; Jeffrey at the Harvard Crimson and then Harvard Law; how Marty Peretz mentored us both; the conservative backlash after Nixon and rebuilding executive power; Ford's pardon; Jeffrey on the team investigating Oliver North; the Boland Amendment and the limits of law; Cheney's role during Iran-Contra; how Congress hasn't declared war since WWII; Whitewater to Lewinsky; Ken Starr and zealous prosecutors; Trump extorting Ukraine over the Bidens; Russiagate; the Mueller Report and Barr's dithering; how such investigations can help presidents; the Bragg indictment; the media environment of Trump compared to Nixon; Fox News coverage of Covid; Trump's pardons; hiding Biden; the immunity case; SEAL Team Six and other hypotheticals; Jack Smith and fake electors; the documents case; the check of impeachment; the state of SCOTUS and ethics scandals; Thomas and the appearance of corruption; the wives of Thomas and Alito; the Chevron doctrine; reproductive rights; the Southern border and asylum; Jeffrey's main worry about a second Trump term; and his upcoming book on presidential pardons.Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Eric Kaufmann on liberal extremism, and Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy on animal cruelty. (Van Jones' PR team canceled his planned appearance.) Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.Here's a fan of last week's episode with Anne Applebaum:I loved your freewheeling interview with Applebaum. Just like the last time she was on, each of you gave as good as you got.I tend to agree more with her, because I fear that sometimes you come off as what Jeane Kirkpatrick called the “blame America first crowd” — not that we haven't committed our sins. But if we didn't exist, Putin would still be evil and want to recreate the Warsaw Pact, and the mullahs in Iran would still be fanatics despite our CIA involvement. It's complicated.Another on foreign policy:I despise Putin, my sympathies are totally with the Ukrainians, and I get angry when people like Rod Dreher and Tucker Carlson imply that the Russians were forced by the West to invade Ukraine. But, so what! You hit the nail on the head with the Obama quote — that Ukraine is never going to mean as much to us as it does to them (the Russians). You also made another very good point that the Russians can't even conquer Ukraine, but we're supposed to fear they will march West? How they going to do that?!Another took issue with several things from Anne:You raised the immigration issue, and Applebaum completely dismissed it: Hungary doesn't have a migrant crisis. … Because it's a useful symbol [to] create fear and anxiety. … This is the oldest political trick in the book, and the creation of an imaginary culture war is one of the ways in which you build support among a more fearful part of the population.WTF? Are Hungarians not allowed to see what is happening in every other European country that has allowed mass migration and see the problems it has caused and proactively decide to prevent this?! Are they not allowed to be concerned until Budapest has the banlieues of Paris, the car bombing gangs of Sweden, and the grooming gangs of England?! And in Germany, it has been recently reported that almost half of people receiving social payments are migrants.Applebaum followed that up with an even bigger gobsmacker about Biden's cognitive decline: “This is another road I don't want to go down, but I know people who met with Joe Biden a couple months ago, and he was fine” (meaning I just want to make my statement but will not allow you a rebuttal). And then:I've met [Harris] a few times, mostly in the context of conversations about foreign policy and about Russia and Ukraine and other things. And she's an intelligent conversationalist. … I was impressed with her. And these are way off-the-record conversations... And I was always more impressed with how she was off the record. And then I would sometimes see her in public. And I thought, she seems very stiff and nervous. … You'd like her if you met her in real life.Translation of both of these excerpts: “You plebes who aren't insiders just don't understand, but trust me — the connected insider — instead of your lying eyes.”Another adds:I think for the next few months, you're going to have to push people like Anne Applebaum to be more open to criticizing the Biden-Harris record. She's a smart person with important things to say, but she clearly dared not criticize the current administration, lest she be seen as helping Trump. And another:She says, unironically, that autocrats rig court systems with exotic new lawfare to attack their political enemies to seize or cling to power. I wonder what that makes Alvin Bragg and Merrick Garland.This Dishhead listened to the episode with his teenage son:The notion that Trump supporters want a dictator is beyond ridiculous. They are among the most individualistic and freedom-loving people in America. They are the Jacksonians, the Scots-Irish heart of this country. They are ornery as hell, and if Trump tried to force them into anything, he'd have another thing coming.  Just look how he tried to get them to take “his” vaccine. That didn't work out so well, did it? The truth is, they view people like Anne as the ones who are taking away their rights and freedoms through their absolute dominance of the media and all cultural institutions. Now maybe Trump will deliver them from that and maybe he won't, but that is what they are seeking — not a dictator, but someone who will break the hideous grip that the liberal elite has on the culture.My son is 18 years old and was also listening to the episode. He is highly engaged in national and world affairs, and he also thought Anne was way off track. He's already announced to his mother (much to her chagrin) that he will be casting his first vote for Trump. And get this: he's going to Oberlin College this fall. I can assure you he's not looking for a dictator. He's looking to say “eff you” to a system that has no use for upper-class, normal white boys like him. The elites hate him and his friends.But I'm glad you have a diversity of views on the Dishcast. It really is the best. I look forward to listening to it every week.I can't back Trump, but I do think your son is onto something. On a few other episodes:Lionel Shriver — I love her! I wished you'd talked more about her novel, Mania. It's not perfect, but it's good.On the Stephen Fry pod, I was resistant! He's irritated me at times. But I loved it when you two started doing Larkin! I shouldn't admit this, but “Aubade” could be my autobiography. I think one or both of you misinterpret “Church Going.” Larkin doesn't wish he had faith. I don't think that's relevant to him. Fry talked about how he liked everything about Anglicanism except for the detail about God (and I always suspect that for Anglicans, God is a somewhat troubling detail). I'm probably just guessing, but I don't think that's Larkin. Larkin didn't wish he had faith. He was elegiac about the past in which there was faith. I think you'll see this sensibility in “An Arundel Tomb.”Agreed. Another on Shriver:She seems to think that “liberals” are mistaken in believing that everyone can be equal, but I think she is mistaken in thinking that is what they believe — at least those I know. Liberals do think that 1) expectations play a role in what people achieve; and 2) given the right circumstances, many people find they can achieve more than was expected. Low expectations do lead to low outcomes (and yes, there is research to support that statement). Does that mean everyone can do anything they wish? No. Neither you nor I will ever be a concert pianist, but let us not condemn everyone to the garbage heap based on false expectations.Thanks as always for your provocative discussions.Here's a guest rec:Musa Al Gharbi, a sociologist at Stony Brook, has written for Compact, American Affairs, and The Liberal Patriot. His forthcoming book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, draws on Pierre Bourdieu's notions of cultural capital to analyze the ascendant symbolic capitalists — those who work in law, technology, nonprofits, academia, journalism and media, finance, civil service and the like — and how the ideology known as “wokeness” exists to entrench economic inequality and preserve the hegemony of this class. I have preordered the book, and it should be a timely read for an election in which class (education), not race, has become the preeminent dividing line in our politics.Here's a guest rec with pecs:I have a recommendation that may sound bonkers, but hear me out: Alan Ritchson, the actor whose career has taken off thanks to playing Jack Reacher on Reacher.The fact that he's really, really, really ridiculously good-looking is the least interesting thing about him. I'd love to hear a conversation between you and him for a few reasons. First, he's bipolar and speaks openly about it. Second, he started taking testosterone supplements after his body broke down from working out for Reacher, and he speaks openly about that too. Third, he's a devout evangelical Christian who speaks openly about his faith — and about his disgust with Christian nationalism and the hijacking of Christianity by many Trump supporters. Fourth, he posted what read to me as a thoughtful, sane critique of bad cops, thereby angering certain denizens of the Very Online Right. Thus, he could speak to a number of major Dishcast themes: mental illness, masculinity, and Christianity. To me, he manages to come across as a guy's guy whose comments on political matters sound like the result of actual reflection, rather than reflexively following a progressive script, which is how most celebrities come across. He's articulate, and the way he's navigating this cultural and political moment is fascinating. And if you do snag him, you should supplement the audio with video.Haha. But seriously, we're trying to keep the podcast fresh and this is a great out-of-the-box recommendation. Next up, the dissents over my views on Harris continue from the main page. A reader writes:I have no particular attachment to Kamala Harris, and share some of your concerns, but your latest column reads more like a Fox News hit piece than a real assessment. The main problem is that you seem to be judging Harris almost exclusively on the basis of statements she made in 2020, at the height of the Democrats' woke mania because of George Floyd. Do you not remember that she was destroyed in the primary because she was a prosecutor, and was to the right of almost everyone else in the primary, except for Biden and Sanders? That's why she lost: she wasn't woke enough. So as VP, of course she pivoted to shore up her appeal to the base, like any good politician would. It's terribly unfortunate that she had to tack hard left precisely as the country was moving back to the center and rejecting wokism, but that doesn't mean she's the “wokest candidate,” as you say. It just means she's a politician.My criticism also extended to her management and campaigning skills in the past. And look: I don't think it's fair to compare my attempt to review the evidence of her record with a Fox News hit-piece. It's important to understand her vulnerabilities as well as he core ideas, if she has any. This next reader thinks she is off to a good, non-woke start:I agree with your criticisms of Harris, at least some of them. We need to have stronger border enforcement, we can't have riots in cities, and racism is real but DEI excesses are also bad. And it's troubling that she has a history of being a bad boss. I can only hope that she has learned from her mistakes. But I take heart from her campaign speech in Wisconsin: she said not a word about DEI, nothing about “vote for me to show that you're not sexist/racist, because I'm a woman of color,” and not much about “Trump is a threat to democracy.” It was all, “I have experience dealing with sleazy crooks and sex offenders like Trump, and I want to help middle-class Americans and protect health care and a woman's right to choose.” Sounds like a popular message!You also say, “She is not a serious person.” Bro, have you *seen* the other party's candidate?

Iran-Contra Hearings - Oliver North Testimony (1987) Part 5/5 The Iran–Contra affair (Persian: ماجرای ایران-کنترا‎, Spanish: Caso Irán–Contra), often referred to as the Iran–Contra scandal, the McFarlane affair (in Iran),[1] or simply Iran–Contra, was a political scandal in the United States that occurred during the second term of the Reagan Administration. Senior administration officials secretly facilitated the sale of arms to the Khomeini government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which was the subject of an arms embargo.[2] The administration hoped to use the proceeds of the arms sale to fund the Contras in Nicaragua. Under the Boland Amendment, further funding of the Contras by the government had been prohibited by Congress. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair Audio taken from: https://youtu.be/Yhroz1tvk-A

Iran-Contra Hearings - Oliver North Testimony (1987) Part 4/5 The Iran–Contra affair (Persian: ماجرای ایران-کنترا‎, Spanish: Caso Irán–Contra), often referred to as the Iran–Contra scandal, the McFarlane affair (in Iran),[1] or simply Iran–Contra, was a political scandal in the United States that occurred during the second term of the Reagan Administration. Senior administration officials secretly facilitated the sale of arms to the Khomeini government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which was the subject of an arms embargo.[2] The administration hoped to use the proceeds of the arms sale to fund the Contras in Nicaragua. Under the Boland Amendment, further funding of the Contras by the government had been prohibited by Congress. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair Audio taken from: https://youtu.be/Yhroz1tvk-A

Iran-Contra Hearings - Oliver North Testimony (1987) Part 3/5 The Iran–Contra affair (Persian: ماجرای ایران-کنترا‎, Spanish: Caso Irán–Contra), often referred to as the Iran–Contra scandal, the McFarlane affair (in Iran),[1] or simply Iran–Contra, was a political scandal in the United States that occurred during the second term of the Reagan Administration. Senior administration officials secretly facilitated the sale of arms to the Khomeini government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which was the subject of an arms embargo.[2] The administration hoped to use the proceeds of the arms sale to fund the Contras in Nicaragua. Under the Boland Amendment, further funding of the Contras by the government had been prohibited by Congress. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair Audio taken from: https://youtu.be/Yhroz1tvk-A

Iran-Contra Hearings - Oliver North Testimony (1987) Part 2/5 The Iran–Contra affair (Persian: ماجرای ایران-کنترا‎, Spanish: Caso Irán–Contra), often referred to as the Iran–Contra scandal, the McFarlane affair (in Iran),[1] or simply Iran–Contra, was a political scandal in the United States that occurred during the second term of the Reagan Administration. Senior administration officials secretly facilitated the sale of arms to the Khomeini government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which was the subject of an arms embargo.[2] The administration hoped to use the proceeds of the arms sale to fund the Contras in Nicaragua. Under the Boland Amendment, further funding of the Contras by the government had been prohibited by Congress. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair Audio taken from: https://youtu.be/Yhroz1tvk-A

Iran-Contra Hearings - Oliver North Testimony (1987) Part 1/5 The Iran–Contra affair (Persian: ماجرای ایران-کنترا‎, Spanish: Caso Irán–Contra), often referred to as the Iran–Contra scandal, the McFarlane affair (in Iran),[1] or simply Iran–Contra, was a political scandal in the United States that occurred during the second term of the Reagan Administration. Senior administration officials secretly facilitated the sale of arms to the Khomeini government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which was the subject of an arms embargo.[2] The administration hoped to use the proceeds of the arms sale to fund the Contras in Nicaragua. Under the Boland Amendment, further funding of the Contras by the government had been prohibited by Congress. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair Audio taken from: https://youtu.be/Yhroz1tvk-A

Baked and Awake Episode 71 March 25 2019   SMQAi YouTube Channel- All credit to SMQ for introducing this topic Buster1978 YouTube Channel- (Researcher who brought the document to SMQAi) The CIA Reading Room Assessment and Analysis of The Gateway Process The Holographic Universe, Michael Talbot The Tao of Physics, Fritjof Capra Belonging to The Universe, Fritjof Capra Tao Te Ching, Lao Tze   “Analysis of the Analysis and Assessment of The Gateway Process, a CIA Report”   Thoughts and takeaways from my reading of and subsequent reflections on the CIA report detailed in episode 70 of the Podcast.  Welcome. Disclaimer- we smoke that weed.   Before I jump into my bulleted list of the five top takeaways I got from this very interesting document, I asked myself, “Self, what were things like back in 1983?  What was going on in America, and the World at that time, that such a task should be set before the United States’ Premiere Intelligence Gathering Organization. The report is dated 9 June.  It was a Thursday. Ronald Reagan is POTUS, but we don’t use that acronym yet. Across the Atlantic, Margaret Thatcher’s famously Conservative Parliament is re-elected in a landslide to a second term. The song “Flashdance” better known by it’s chorus “..what a feeling” tops the US Pop music charts, while the still young, and rising star Michael Jackson occupied the #5 spot on the R&B charts with “Beat it”.  MJ is years and many more chart topping hits away from the scandals and accusations that would plague him in the era leading up to his death. Let’s paint this picture in just a little more. Also in 1983, at the same time that the CIA is paying people to deeply and seriously investigate and report upon things like the Astral Projection and Remote Viewing program we have come to know as The Monroe Institute’s Gateway Process, we have- the creation of Crack Cocaine in The Bahamas, where it almost immediately moves to the US. 267 Marines are killed in a terrorist attack in Beirut, an act that would lead directly to a US Invasion of Grenada two days later.  The Space Shuttle Challenger is still flying, with America’s first Female Astronaut, Sally Ride aboard. The US Government for some reason admits to shielding Klaus Barbie aka “The Butcher of Lyon” an infamous and murderous Nazi who was wanted in France for War Crimes. Compact Discs are also introduced in 1983, heralding the end of the Golden era of Vinyl records and foreshadowing our digital future. Some of you listening to this podcast now may have never played a CD in your lives. Ditto for Cassette tapes, as an aside. Motorola in 1983 had just received permission to test Cellular Telephone technology in the US for the first time, and the El Nino weather phenomenon became worldwide news for the first time, marking the moment when we became aware of concepts such as Global Warming, or as we tend to call it today by the neutered label of “Climate Change”.     On the television in our house: Professional Tantrum Thrower John McEnroe was screaming at line judges in ways that today would get him banned for life, while Martina Navratilova was, more quietly- playing better tennis than everyone alive (put together) including the legendary Billie Jean King, and perhaps even that loud American Man. The Islanders, Our New York Islanders, under the capable leadership of  Brawler (and multiple record breaking leading scorer and future hall of famer) Mike Bossy, fellow prolific scorer Bryan Trottier (Also an NHL Hockey Hall of Famer), and anchored by the legendary goalie Billy Smith(yep, also a HHoF’er)- had the Stanley Cup. Still. They won four in a row between 79-80 and 1984. Between these victories and the soon to come Amazin’ Mets in 1986, these were without equivocation or room for interpretation- The Wonder Years for Long Islanders that they still reminisce about to this day. As for me, young Stephen- well I guess I was 9 years old and still almost two months away from my 10th Birthday, one slightly notable in that I received a couple of token, but seemingly very important, grown up gifts that year.  My first wallet, with a ten spot and a dime inside, and a shiny new Casio Digital watch with calendar and chronograph. (Boy, was I ever on my way!)   As I hope I have established with some degree of credibility, it was a different time. A time where we see however, the birth and beginnings of some things that will come to dominate our lives today.  We see in 1983 bright hope for the future in the form of space flights and technological wonders like Cell phones and though not detailed above, the game changer of Personal Computers. But there is as yet, no internet.  More ominously at this time we experience the United States invasion of Grenada in the first in a series of Central and South American conflicts (some would say US backed regime change campaigns) that won’t end until after the Iran Contra scandal in Reagan’s second term in 1986, for which only Oliver North, a Lowly Colonel and obvious scapegoat, and a few government contractors are found guilty or serve any significant time for having secretly laundered and delivered $18 Million dollars (and probably some weapons) to the Cocaine Trade Powered Contras, (Now you know where the Video Game got its name)  who were fighting to overthrow the Cuban backed, therefore evil Communist Scum- Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, in violation of the Boland Amendment that specifically banned the CIA and the DOD from funding groups with ties to the drug trade. This shameful meddling was made more humiliating by the fact that the $18 million that ended up in the Contras hands came from a larger sum of $30 million AND a pile of weapons traded to Iran for Seven American Hostages that had been kidnapped in 1985 in Lebanon. This deal was brokered in secret, while President Reagan loudly proclaimed that “We do not negotiate with terrorists” except when we do and then we won’t tell you about it.   We include the last example as a means of establishing the connection between the US Government and it’s foreign policy a the time, and that of today. In the 1980’s our Executive Branch of government would and did engage in acts of deception, violations of our own laws as well as international best practices for dealing with fractious Groups and Governments around the world. This has not changed, as we have frequently observed here on Baked and Awake when looking at more modern actions taken by our government in the present day.   List of Key Takeaways for me after reading the doc.  These are the threads we will pull on in our examination of the report.   36 years ago, in 1983, the CIA was seriously investigating programs like The Gateway Process and others in an attempt to confirm the existence of and quantify, even systematize utilization of such seemingly superhuman abilities including, but not limited to: Lucid Dreaming, Dream Recall, Astral Projection, or Out of Body Experiences- OBE’s. Remote Viewing, or the act of observing people, places, and events from afar while in a sleep or meditative state. Add to the above the express goal of Focus 21 and above (check this) in The Gateway Process, of stepping out of the bounds of temporal space completely, engaging in a form of Time Travel. (Section One) The top level description of the techniques employed by The Monroe Institute are a sort of Pop Psychological pastiche of Binaural beats, Isochronic Frequencies and other audio tones, employed on top of breathing exercises and as far as is noted in the report achieved without the use of drugs- seems harmless and mostly unsurprising to those of us thinking about it in 2019 with decades of exposure to Yoga, Mindfulness in the Workplace, and Self Care tips from Pinterest helping us achieve collective enlightenment between our trips to Target for all material goods not purchased on Amazon.  But this isn’t 2019. It’s 1983. Neighborhood Butcher Shops with sawdust on the wrinkled hardwood floor with their smell and texture so magical that it defies explanation- are still a thing. Travel Agents were still as successful as Attorneys, and worked twice as hard- and The CIA is investigating High New Agey seeming weirdness with a dead serious approach that recognizes everything it’s looking into as being part of understood Science, not the Paranormal. Not witchcraft. They invoke labels like Quantum, Holograms, Dimensions, etc. and look to Physicists to provide the framework for understanding the systems, tools and processes at work. All this, with the objective of learning from The Gateway Process the secrets of consciousness itself, access to the great unwritten but nevertheless perfectly preserved whole of universal knowledge in the form of something that we only have terms like “The Akashic Records” for,  AND how to participate in events at any point in time or space, everywhere in the past, present, or future. The key concepts here are enumerated under Section Five of the Document. (Section 12) “Energy creates, stores, and retrieves meaning in the universe by projecting or expanding at certain frequencies in a three dimensional mode that creates a living pattern called a Hologram”.  See also: Michale Talbot’s Visionary book from the late 1980’s, The Holographic Universe. In short- the CIA says (paraphrasing) that “The Absolute”, as they refer to it, is an infinite self aware energetic field that pervades and suffuses everything in the universe. This field expresses itself and experiences itself through movement in a three dimensional realm wherein every iota of matter is just one of countless resonating fields of energy, experiencing reality from it’s own perspective, with perfect capture of the information being created into the universal hologram. This information can be retrieved during certain exercises in methods such as The Gateway Process.  The CIA also admits to and notes the similarities between things like Trances, Meditation, and “Kundalini Psychosis” as they label it, to The Gateway Process. Section 19- The report painstakingly describes how human consciousness establishes and maintains a nearly continuous, but ephemeral level of contact with the infinite through completely natural oscillations in brain wave frequencies, focusing in on the moment of rest in between swings of a given wavelengths vibration. At the tiny, completely imperceptible moment when our brainwaves stop, for just a nanosecond, before swinging the other way- consciousness “clicks out” of this dimension and joins the Absolute, the infinite. To explain it, they invoke “Planck’s Distance” to explain the moment this occurs.  Planck’s Length, as we often refer to it today, is explained in part, as follows: The Planck length is the scale at which quantum gravitational effects are believed to begin to be apparent, where interactions require a working theory of quantum gravity to be analyzed. The Planck area is the area by which the surface of a spherical black hole increases when the black hole swallows one bit of information. To measure anything the size of Planck length, the photon momentum needs to be very large due to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and so much energy in such a small space would create a tiny Black hole with the diameter of its event horizon equal to a Planck length. The report appears to describe a model of understanding of The Universe that characterizes the shape of the Universe as a torus, or a self enclosed spiral (Think those spinning apple core analogies you’ve seen or one of those infinity bracelets made out of slinky like metal and woven in a cross pattern that you can endlessly rotate or spin along your arm and it doesn’t twist up or tie itself into knots. This gestalt then goes on to explain that the parts of Universe we observe now from our vantage point tend to support the understanding that we are existing near the top of the moving spiral pattern, and are about to move into the part of the patterns where our locality begins to fall back toward the Universal center, to be reabsorbed and then, eventually, re born out the other side of the pattern. Refer to Section 25 for a more complete understanding of this notion.   Other Themes touched upon in the report, just listed without deep explanations.  Read the Doc to see for yourself if you also pickup on these vibes:   Subliminal and Sub Audible tones and Auto Hypnotic suggestion can be used to facilitate the focus process. Deja Vu could be explained by observations described in the report Patterning, described in Section 30-B sounds a lot like “The Law of Attraction” or “The Secret” to me.   Section 29-Describes an “Energy Bar Tool” that is directly likened to a psychic Magic Wand. Focus 15- “Travel into the past” (Section 29-G) Focus 21 “The Future” (Section 29-H)   Episode Credits LINKS: Website: www.bakedandawake.com (http://www.bakedandawake.com)   Email: talktous@bakedandawake.com   Rss: http://bakedandawake.libsyn.com/rss   YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/BakedAndAwakePodcast   Libsyn Podcast Page: http://bakedandawake.libsyn.com/  (http://bakedandawake.libsyn.com/)   Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/bakedandawakepodcast   Twitter:  https://twitter.com/stevecominski (@baked_and_awake)   Insta: https://www.instagram.com/baked_and_awake/   Teepublic: https://www.teepublic.com/user/bakedandawake   Episode ambient Music generously provided by Antti Luode (http://www.soundclick.com/AnttiLuode),http://www.soundclick.com/_mobileFrame.cfm?bandID=1277008   Baked and Awake is proudly affiliated with the Dark Myths Collective. 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The Iran–Contra affair , also referred to as Irangate, Contragate or the Iran–Contra scandal, was a political scandal in the United States that occurred during the second term of the Reagan Administration. Senior administration officials secretly facilitated the sale of arms to Iran, which was the subject of an arms embargo. They hoped, thereby, to fund the Contras in Nicaragua while at the same time negotiating the release of several U.S. hostages. Under the Boland Amendment, further funding of the Contras by the government had been prohibited by Congress.

Oliver Laurence North (born October 7, 1943) is an American political commentator, television host, military historian, author, and retired United States Marine Corps lieutenant colonel. He was convicted in the Iran–Contra affair of the late 1980s but his convictions were vacated and reversed, and all charges against him dismissed in 1991. North is primarily remembered for his term as a National Security Council staff member during the Iran–Contra affair, a political scandal of the late 1980s. The scandal involved the illegal sale of weapons to Iran to encourage the release of U.S. hostages then held in Lebanon. North formulated the second part of the plan, which was to divert proceeds from the arms sales to support the Contra rebel groups in Nicaragua, which had been specifically prohibited under the Boland Amendment. North was granted limited immunity from prosecution in exchange for testifying before Congress about the scheme.

There is an adage in Anglo-American law that says, "The King can do no wrong," a reflection of the power of kings stemming from the conquest of Britain by William the Conqueror in 1066. It remains in American law under the doctrine called sovereign immunity, which protects the government from suit by its citizens. But beyond the law there is the practice of politicians of bowing to the power of the president, no matter what he (or someday, she) does. There is no question that Richard Nixon broke laws during the Watergate scandal. Nor is there serious question that Ronald Reagan violated the Boland Amendment, which outlawed aid to the contras in Nicaragua. When the present Bush administration wiretapped the phone calls of Americans it violated the F.I.S.A. (or Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) law, which required secret court orders to proceed. Yet, in none of these cases were presidents charged for violating the laws. Indeed, when Nixon was threatened with impeachment, his handpicked successor, Gerald Ford, issued a pardon before any charges were even made! There's an important lesson here, in that the presidents known as the toughest on crime, didn't want that toughness when it came to their crimes. Historians have demonstrated that high ranking congressmen worked out a nice, neat deal with Nixon, sparing him the embarrassment of impeachment if he resigned. Centuries after a revolution, in the name of democracy , and it's still 'the king can do no wrong.' Or as Richard Nixon put it, "When the President does it, that makes it legal." Clearly, if George W. Bush has studied anything, it's Nixon. From secret prisons to legalized torture; from renditions abroad to wiretaps at home; from illegal wars to ruinous occupations, crimes - as in violations of both U.S. and International laws - have become presidential prerogatives. And Congress has become legislative enablers, by not only taking impeachment off the table, but by rewriting laws to make crimes legal, and also granting retroactive immunity to those corporate criminals which aided and abetted the White House in its crime sprees. When the White House urged companies to quietly violate FISA by spying on Americans' communications, both sides knew the law was being violated. If this involved poor folks, conspiracy charges would've been leveled, and the conspirators would've been cast into prison. But in the recent FISA amendments, a majority of the members of the House voted to grant immunity to phone companies. How would you like that kind of juice? Well, you can't have it. You'd have to be a multi-million (or billion) dollar corporation...or a president. 6/21/08] (c) '08 Mumia Abu-Jamal