DEDICATED TO EXPOSING DISINFORMATION AND PROPAGANDA AND TO PROMOTING UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS - WITH SHARP ANALYSIS AND BLUNT COMMENTARY. NO ADS. NO TIP-JAR. JUST THE TRUTH.
[FREEMAN] said the Tea Party's "stated policy, publicly stated, is to do whatever it takes to see to it that Obama only serves on term term. What's, what does that, what underlines that? Screw the country. We're going to do whatever we do to get this black man, we can, we're going to do whatever we can to get this black man outta here."MAYBE WE SHOULDN'T BE SO SHOCKED FREEMAN IS A JERK: HE'S HAD A SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP WITH HIS STEP-GRANDDAUGHTER FOR A LONG TIME.
80 Arrested in Financial District Protest
The police in New York City made scores of arrests as hundreds of people, many of whom had been encamped in a lengthy protest, marched north to Union Square
“Fiasco” was the word chosen by one scientist in an e-mail to the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., alerting his colleagues to erroneous claims made by the publishers of the atlas (whose name derives from The Times of London) about the speed at which ’s glaciers are melting.
He also feared that a map in the atlas, along with news accounts repeating an error in the news release, could pull climate scientists into another vortex of damaging controversy.
The news release, echoed by the news media, claimed that Greenland had lost 15 percent of its permanent ice cover from 1999 to 2011.
That translates to 125,000 cubic miles, according to a rough calculation by Etienne Berthier, a glaciologist with the University of Toulouse, enough melted ice to raise sea levels three to five feet.
The corresponding map in the atlas itself indicated that significant portions of Greenland’s coastline had become ice-free.
Glaciologists, previously bruised by an exaggerated claim about the melting of Himalayan glaciers in a 2007 United Nations report that became fodder for skeptics, mobilized as a truth squad.
On blogs, on radio programs and in newspaper columns, they stated emphatically that Greenland has not lost 15 percent of its ice cover in recent years.
The retreat, they said, is more like one-tenth of 1 percent.
1/1OTH OF 1% VERSUS 15%/
HMMMMMM...... THAT'S A HUGE ERROR - OVERSTATING MELTING BY 15,000%.
YUP: FIFTEEN-THOUSAND PERCENTAGE POINTS OFF.
THEY OVERSTATED MELTING BY 150X!
“I respectfully disagree,” Netanyahu said. “The Palestinians are basically trying to shortcut this. They’re trying to get a state without giving us peace, without giving us security.”All Clinton is doing is distortion, to say nothing of an inability to bring himself to lay any blame at the feet of the PLO.
“President Clinton knows very well [that] in 2000 at Camp David … who really made the generous offer and the Palestinians refused to come,” he said. “I’m sure that President Bush can tell you what happened at Camp David a few years later, when another Israeli prime minister made a generous offer, and the Palestinians refused to come.”
When asked if he had moved the goalposts, Netanyahu said, “Not at all.”
3. Millionaires pay proportionately less income tax than poorer people.Obama will, of course, continue to push his tax-the-rich theme. He is trying to play the populist.
In a speech on Monday, Obama said raising taxes on millionaires isn’t class warfare, but “math.” His math may be off: According to the IRS, those with adjusted gross incomes of more than $1 million paid an average of 23.3 percent in federal income taxes in 2008; those earning between $100,000 and $200,000 paid 12.7 percent; and those earning between $50,000 and $100,000 paid 8.9 percent. Half of American families don’t make enough money to pay income taxes at all....
[...]
5. Obama’s “millionaires’ tax” won’t seriously limit investment.
That’s the line of reasoning that the administration is using. On Monday, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told reporters that the president’s plan wouldn’t hurt growth. “I am very confident that the modest changes we’re suggesting in terms of revenues . . . would make the economy stronger in the long term, not weaker in the long term,” he said.
Geithner’s confidence is somewhat misplaced. According to a 2001 congressional study that confirmed a basic tenet of macroeconomics, “each $1 of marginal tax rate cuts would save the private economy at least $1.25 as deadweight losses fall and economic efficiency increases.” Taxes distort investment decisions. Why throw money into productive assets — corporate securities, a rental property or new employees for a small business — if the income they generate will be taxed away?
Taxes on the rich are taxes on people who create jobs. And jobs are an unalloyed good thing for an economy. Excessively taxing the capital that makes the economy go is poor public policy. And we have a recent example of how the opposite works well: Unemployment declined by a third in the four years after the Bush tax cuts were fully implemented in 2003, dropping to 4.2 percent from 6.2 percent. Meanwhile, federal revenue increased 44 percent in those years. If these tax cuts put people to work and generated money for the government, shouldn’t Obama consider the possibility that tax increases should be avoided?
Ten years and two wars after 9/11, America’s struggle against Islamist terrorism is nowhere close to succeeding. And there is no better admission of failure than new airport security procedures to grope and fondle Americans. But if a superpower like America can’t vanquish this scourge, is there any force in the world that can?
There might well be: Bollywood, India’s flamboyant film industry. Just as the Beatles and Rock n’ Roll helped bring down the Kremlin, similarly, Bollywood might yet prove to be the undoing of Osama bin Laden and his noxious brand of Islamic fundamentalism.
--The euro zone has six weeks to resolve its crisis, U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne said Friday, warning that regional banks need to be shored up and the euro-zone bailout mechanism may need its firepower boosted.ITEM 2: GREEKS CONTEMPLATING DEFAULT:
Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of this week's International Monetary Fund meeting in Washington, Osborne said that international pressure is mounting on the euro zone to act fast and that regional leaders were aware that "time was running out for them."
Greece's finance minister has told lawmakers he sees three scenarios to resolve the debt crisis, including one involving an orderly default with a 50pc haircut for bondholders, two Greek newspapers reported on Friday.I THINK IN A MORAL SENSE, THE POLITICIANS HAVE ALREADY DEFAULTED. AND THAT'S WHY AN ORDERLY DEFAULT IS LIKELY.
"In Rush to Aid Solyndra, U.S. Missed the Warning SignsWHAT WAS THE RUSH?!? TO GET THE DEAL DONE IN TIME FOR AN OBAMA VISIT.
Industry analysts and government auditors say the administration failed to take note of trouble in the solar energy marketplace.
They should apologize, and... - you should pardon the expression - move on.
MORE HERE.Amendment 9 - Construction of Constitution.
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Amendment 10 - Powers of the States and People.
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Iran’s president delivered a bombastic anti-Western tirade at his General Assembly speech on Thursday, blaming the United States, Israel and Europe for the global recession and a litany of other ills. The speech provoked what has become a ritual large-scale walkout of delegations led by the United States.THIS SPEECH WASN'T JIHADIST; IT WAS LEFTIST.
The president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said poverty, homelessness and denial of basic rights were traceable to “greed for materialism in the United States and Europe.”
The gap in life expectancy between Israeli Jews and Arabs – especially among men – has grown in recent years to 3.7 years, compared with only two years in 1998.So what can we learn from this? While Jewish women might have some catching up to do in terms of exercise (though plenty of young teenage girls here seem far from overweight), they do refrain from too much smoking, in contrast to the Arab world, where smoking does still seem to be quite a big thing, though Arab women appear to recognize the hazards. On the other hand, look at how bad their percentage of exercise happens to be!
This is one of the trends evident from the 2010 National Health Report of the Health Ministry’s Center for Disease Control issued for publication on Thursday.
Although the report is statistical and does not offer explanations, it seems that a major reason for the gap is lifestyle differences, including tobacco use: 48.8 percent of Arab men still smoke, compared to 31.8% of all Israeli men and 14.8% of all Israeli women.
The high smoking rate among Arab men and the low smoking rate among Arab women raises the male national national smoking rate among men and lowers the female national smoking rate.
The incidence of cancer rose between 1979 and 2007 by 37% among Jewish men and 27% among Jewish women, compared to 140% among Arab men and 150% among Arab women; cancer rates had always been low among Arabs due to a more rural lifestyle.
Arab Israeli adults are significantly less likely to exercise regularly compared to their Jewish counterparts; 32.4% of the general population say they exercise at least three times a week for 20 minutes each session.
Among Jewish men, the self-reported exercise rate was 38% and of Jewish women 32.8%, compared to 23.8% for Arab men and 15.4% of Arab women.
Infant mortality has dropped in all sectors, both Jewish and Arab, but it remains more than twice as high among Israeli Arab babies; it now totals 3.8 per 1,000 live births. The rate in the Jewish sector is 2.9, compared to 6.5 per 1,000 live births among Arabs. The main causes of death in babies up to the age of one year is premature birth and congenital defects. During the past decade, infant mortality dropped by 78%, with the rate of decline similar in all sectors.
"Given the uncertainty around the eurozone, it's only natural that we would seek to reduce any potential downside risk," Lloyd's Finance DirectorLuke Savage told Dow Jones Newswires on Wednesday.
"As a result, we're not holding government debt of any peripheral EU country and have sought to reduce our exposure to banks in these countries."
21 reasons we're heaaded for a crash:
#1 We are seeing an amazing number of bets against the S&P 500 right now. According to CNN, the number of bets against the S&P 500 rose to the highest level in a year last month. But that was nothing compared to what we are seeing for October. The number of bets against the S&P 500 for the month of October is absolutely astounding. Somebody is going to make a monstrous amount of money if there is a stock market crash next month.
#2 Investors are pulling a huge amount of money out of stocks right now. Do they know something that we don't? The following is from a report in the Financial Post....Investors have pulled more money from U.S. equity funds since the end of April than in the five months after the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., adding to the $2.1 trillion rout in American stocks.#3 Siemens has pulled more than half a billion euros out of two major French banks and has moved that money to the European Central Bank. Do they know something or are they just getting nervous?
About $75 billion was withdrawn from funds that focus on shares during the past four months, according to data compiled by Bloomberg from the Investment Company Institute, a Washington-based trade group, and EPFR Global, a research firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Outflows totaled $72.8 billion from October 2008 through February 2009, following Lehman's bankruptcy, the data show.
#4 On Monday, Standard & Poor's cut Italy's credit rating from A+ to A.
#5 The European Central Bank is purchasing even more Italian and Spanish bonds in an attempt to cool down the burgeoning financial crisis in Europe.
#6 The Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan and the Swiss National Bank have announced that they are going to make available an "unlimited" amount of money to European commercial banks in October, November and December.
#7 So far this year, the largest bank in Italy has lost over half of its value and the second largest bank in Italy is down 44 percent.
#8 Angela Merkel's coalition is getting embarrassed in local elections in Germany. A recent poll found that an astounding 82 percent of all Germans believe that her government is doing a bad job of handling the crisis in Greece. Right now, public opinion in Germany is very negative toward the bailouts, and that is really bad news for Greece.
#9 Greece is experiencing a full-blown economic collapse at this point. Just consider the following statistics from a recent editorial in the Guardian....Consider first the scale of the crisis. After contracting in 2009 and 2010, GDP fell by a further 7.3% in the second quarter of 2011. Unemployment is approaching 900,000 and is projected to exceed 1.2 million, in a population of 11 million. These are figures reminiscent of the Great Depression of the 1930s.#10 In 2009, Greece had a debt to GDP ratio of about 115%. Today, Greece has a debt to GDP ratio of about 160%. All of the austerity that has been imposed upon them has done nothing to solve their long-term problems.
#11 The yield on 1 year Greek bonds is now over 129 percent. A year ago the yield on those bonds was under 10 percent.
#12 Greek Deputy Finance Minister Filippos Sachinidis says that Greece only has enough cash to continue operating until next month.
#13 Italy now has a debt to GDP ratio of about 120% and their economy is far, far larger than the economy of Greece.
#14 The yield on 2 year Portuguese bonds is now over 17 percent. A year ago the yield on those bonds was about 4 percent.
#15 China seems to be concerned about the stability of European banks. The following is from a recent Reuters report....A big market-making state bank in China's onshore foreign exchange market has stopped foreign exchange forwards and swaps trading with several European banks due to the unfolding debt crisis in Europe, two sources told Reuters on Tuesday.#16 European central banks are now buying more gold than they are selling. This is the first time that has happened in more than 20 years.
#17 The chief economist at the IMF says that the global economy has entered a "dangerous new phase".
#18 Israel has dumped 46 percent of its U.S. Treasuries and Russia has dumped 95 percent of its U.S. Treasuries. Do they know something that we don't?
#19 World financial markets are expecting that the Federal Reserve will announce a new bond-buying plan this week that will be designed to push long-term interest rates lower.
#20 If some wealthy investors believe that the Obama tax plan has a chance of getting through Congress, they may start dumping stocks before the end of this year in order to avoid getting taxed at a much higher rate in 2012.
#21 According to a study that was recently released by Merrill Lynch, the U.S. economy has an 80% chance of going into another recession.
BETTER BRACE YOURSELVES...
His jaw must have dropped when he examined the material before him. It was a rare find. So rare, in fact, that, if what he was looking at was really what he thought it could be, it would be the first and only evidence of soft body tissue from an early hominin ever discovered.......soft tissue from an early (possible) pre-human ancestor nearly 2 million years old. The find was part of the remains uncovered by paleoanthropologist Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand and his colleagues when they discovered fossils of Australopithecus sediba, a possible precursor to our earliest human ancestors (the Homo genus) in the Malapa cave system of South Africa.IF IT TURNS OUT TO BE HOMINID SKIN WITH EXTRACTABLE DNA, THEN I WANT THEM TO COMPARE THE DNA TO MICHELLE OBAMA'S! SHOULD BE A CLOSE MATCH!
"I was standing with Lee in his lab looking at what might be australopithecine skin" said Dr. John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist with the University of Wisconsin - Madison. "I'm not talking about an imprint of skin, like a skin cast. These appear to be thinly layered, possibly mineralized tissue"[1].
The possible mineralized skin tissue was found on top of the skull of the fossil remains of what was identified as a young boy, and on the jaw near the chin of a fossilized woman. Scientists suggest that such surviving evidence is possible because the remains of the individuals found at Malapa were rapidly deposited and entombed in a thick layer of sand and clay through natural causes in a cave or shaft at or soon after their deaths. The relatively rapid burial of their bodies in this single layer of clay and sand, combined with the comparatively protected environment of the cave or shaft system, significantly slowed their decomposition. The same conditions also made it possible for scientists to discover the individuals in articulated condition (body elements or parts arranged as they were "connected" in life as a single individual), a rare find, particularly for early hominins.
An energy firm which has been test drilling for controversial "shale gas" in Lancashire has said it has found vast gas resources underground.
Cuadrilla Resources began testing for gas on the Fylde Coast in March, using a technique known as "fracking".
It said it had found 200 trillion cubic feet of gas under the ground, which if recovered could provide 5,600 jobs in the UK, 1,700 of those in Lancashire.
Opponents to the process believe it produces damaging carbon emissions.
CARBON IS BENIGN.
LET THE FRACKING BEGIN!
Palestinian refugees will not become citizens of a new Palestinian state, according to Palestine’s ambassador to Lebanon.The creation of a "Palestinian State" in Judea and Samaria is just a ploy, a stepping-stone on the Arab jihadist path to the destruction of free, democratic Israel and an eventual caliphate.
From behind a desk topped by a miniature model of Palestine’s hoped-for blue United Nations chair, Ambassador Abdullah Abdullah spoke to The Daily Star Wednesday about Palestine’s upcoming bid for U.N. statehood.
The ambassador unequivocally says that Palestinian refugees would not become citizens of the sought for U.N.-recognized Palestinian state, an issue that has been much discussed. “They are Palestinians, that’s their identity,” he says. “But … they are not automatically citizens.”
This would not only apply to refugees in countries such as Lebanon, Egypt, Syria and Jordan or the other 132 countries where Abdullah says Palestinians reside. Abdullah said that “even Palestinian refugees who are living in [refugee camps] inside the [Palestinian] state, they are still refugees. They will not be considered citizens.”
Abdullah said that the new Palestinian state would “absolutely not” be issuing Palestinian passports to refugees.
This is simply unbelievable. For years, the world has backed a Palestinian state on the grounds Palestinians are stateless people who deserve a country of their own. And now, a senior Palestinian official has announced once they have received a state, most Palestinians will still be stateless – even those who actually live in “Palestine.”Of course it isn't really "unbelievable." It is just another typical Arab performance.
Moreover, the new state won’t provide these residents with any services: It expects UNRWA – or, more accurately, the American and European taxpayers who provide the bulk of that organization’s funding – to continue providing their schooling, healthcare, welfare allowances, etc.
WHAT AN ASS.Moody’s Investors Service cut its credit ratings on Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo on Wednesday, saying that Washington was now less likely to bail out the banks if needed.
“The downgrades result from a decrease in the probability that the U.S. government would support the bank, if needed,” Moody’s said.
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) - Ratings agency Moody's Investors Service MCO -1.67% on Monday lowered the rating outlook on Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. to negative from stable after the bank said it will raise $6 billion in new capital and expects a $2.8 billion loss for the second quarter. The ratings agency said it made cuts because of "concerns over risk management decisions that resulted in elevated real estate exposures and the subsequent ineffectiveness of hedges to mitigate these exposures in the recent quarter."LEHMAN FILED FOR BANKRUPTCY IN SEPTEMBER 15.
Standard & Poor's said Wednesday that it had downgraded seven Italian banks because of sovereign debt risk, a day after the agency downgraded Italy's credit rating.The cut targeted leading banks Mediobanca SpA and Intesa Sanpaolo SpA, as well as Findomestic Banca SpA, Banca IMI SpA, Banca Nazionale del Lavoro SpA, Banca Infrastrutture Innovazione e Sviluppo SpA and Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna SpA.MAYBE AN EVEN BIGGER AND WORSER UH-OH:
The agency said it was assigning negative outlooks to the long-term ratings on these seven banks. It was also revising its outlooks from stable to negative on eight other Italian banks, including Unicredit.
Indonesia’s Mount Tambora volcano alert level heightenedWHY MIGHT THIS BE BAD NEWS? HERE'S WHY:
Dompu - Increased rumblings this month from Mount Tambora on Indonesia’s Sumbawa Island are forcing residents to take the mountain seriously, with authorities there raising the volcano alert to its second-highest level.
Mount Tambora (or Tamboro) is an active stratovolcano, also known as a composite volcano, on the island ofSumbawa, Indonesia. Sumbawa is flanked both to the north and south by oceanic crust, and Tambora was formed by the active subduction zone beneath it. This raised Mount Tambora as high as 4,300 m (14,100 ft),[4] making it formerly one of the tallest peaks in the Indonesian archipelago. After a large magma chamber inside the mountain filled over the course of several decades, volcanic activity reached a historic climax in the super-colossal eruption of April 1815.[5]
The 1815 eruption is rated 7 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index, the only such eruption since the Lake Taupo eruption in about 180 AD.[6] With an estimated ejecta volume of 160 cubic kilometers, Tambora's 1815 outburst was the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history.
Egypt: Obama supported a revolution overthrowing a U.S. ally — rather than a smooth transition replacing the dictator and instituting some reform without dropping the entire regime — disregarding State Department advice and not even consulting with Jordan, Israel, or Saudi Arabia! He also unilaterally announced his readiness to see the Muslim Brotherhood in power. His analysts denied that the Brotherhood is a radical, anti-American Islamist organization that supports terrorism. The resulting dangerous crisis, including Egypt becoming a new type of Iran, is now clear to all.
Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process: By distancing himself from Israel, removing all pressure from the Palestinians, unilaterally proposing a freeze of Israeli construction on settlements, and repeatedly messing up the effort to restart negotiations, Obama made the peace process situation worse. His failure to handle properly the Palestinian UN unilateral independence bid has put U.S. policy in a terrible mess, with an American veto leading to large-scale anti-Americanism and probable violence both by Palestinians against Israel and by Muslims against the United States.
Israel: The damage the Obama administration did to Israel was not in bilateral relations or even in the “peace process,” but by its role in the deterioration of the regional situation to a dangerous extent. As a result, the two most powerful regional powers that had decent relations with Israel — Egypt and Turkey — turned around 180 degrees; Hamas’ rule was entrenched in the Gaza Strip; and Hizballah’s rule was entrenched in Lebanon. That’s four of Israel’s “neighbors” that became effectively hostile while the Obama administration didn’t even notice. As the level of threat rose, U.S. political-diplomatic support for Israel declined.
Turkey: As Turkey continued to move toward being a repressive Islamist state allied with revolutionary Islamism, the U.S. government didn’t notice. Farcically, it promoted the ”Turkish model” and made Turkey its mediator over Syria’s future!
Lebanon: As Lebanon fell under Syria-Iran-Hizballah control, the Obama administration did nothing. It failed to support the moderates and so they surrendered.
Syria: The administration pursued the ridiculously doomed effort to pull Syria away from Iran and engaged it even as Damascus escalated its support for terrorism, aggression toward Lebanon, killing Americans in Iraq, and then repressing its own people.
Gaza: The administration gave Hamas indirect aid, made no serious effort to overthrow a radical, anti-American, genocidal-oriented regime, and pressed Israel to reduce sanctions to a minimum. This ensured the survival and strengthening of a pro-terrorist revolutionary Islamist state on the Mediterranean.
Saudi Arabia: Repeated slaps in the face and failure to confront advances by revolutionary Islamists — especially Iran and Syria, as well as abandonment of Mubarak — disgusted this ally. Seeing U.S. weakness, it concluded it has to take care of itself
Iran: After wasting a long time in engagement, the administration finally (at the slowest possible speed) did push sanctions. Yet it still has no strategy for opposing Iran’s non-nuclear methods of subverting neighbors and expanding its influence.
Danger: Obama failed to realize it or to define properly friends and enemies.
Leadership: Despite being begged by different allies, the Obama administration failed to demonstrate leadership.
Empowering Islamism: In his Cairo speech and thereafter, Obama emphasized the Muslim identity of Middle Easterners thus undermining Arab identity and nationalism.
Endangering the lives of American soldiers and civilians: By refusing to allow a proper analysis of Islamism and terrorism. Consider, for example, the Fort Hood attack in which Americans were killed because military officers feared to do their job lest it hurt their promotions.
Libya: Obama entered a war without any strategy for what would happen after Gaddafi fell or any knowledge of who he was helping to promote as the new leadership.
Rejection of basic diplomatic principles: Supporting friends and punishing enemies; credibility; deterrence; coherent strategy.
Obama started all wrong, got it all wrong. Now everyone, especially Israel, will be lucky to simply get out of the impending crash in one piece.
That is probably the best that reasonably can be expected.
