World's Scariest license plate:
Foody one liners:
The snack bar next door to an atom smasher was called "The Fission Chips."
On April Fools Day, a mother put a fire cracker under the pancakes. She blew her stack.
A friend got some vinegar in his ear, now he suffers from pickled hearing.
Overweight is something that just sort of snacks up on you.
Sign in restaurant window: "Eat now - Pay waiter."
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It's all about cutting money government spends . I am sure every program can be justified by the recipients and their small group of loyal supporters but in the larger sweep of national survival and interests these proposed cuts have merit and I am sure there are plenty, plenty more that can and should be made.
Then think about all the money that could be saved corporate America and the enhanced productivity that would ensue if every government regulation was debated, redrafted and/or eliminated. The paper alone would save forests! (See 1 below.)
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Roubini remains concerned and skeptical about the world economy. (See 2 below.)
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The loss of our Republic is a fact that has occurred over time. For Atty. Gen'l.Holder's more recent contribution.
We have already witnessed the background curtains in the White Press Corps have changed to a Muslim yellow print.(See 3 below.)
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Ira Straus see a moral inversion in our foreign policy actions versus pronouncements. He writes: "...The pattern is obvious: against our friends and our interests. It is as if we are so scared of the accusations of having a normal double standard in our own favor that we lean over backwards and adopt a double standard against ourselves..."
(See 4 below.)
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I caught the New Hampshire debate tonight among the current crop of Republican candidates. They are a varied and generally impressive group and their party will eventually sort through and come up with the candidate who will defeat Obama. Obama will assist them in his own defeat because of his poor and failing policies which have resulted in our nation's quickened decline.
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Dick
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1) These are all the programs the new Republican House has proposed cutting. Read to the end.
•Corporation for Public Broadcasting Subsidy. $445 million annual savings.
•Save America 's Treasures Program. $25 million annual savings.
•International Fund for Ireland . $17 million annual savings.
•Legal Services Corporation. $420 million annual savings.
•National Endowment for the Arts. $167.5 million annual savings.
•National Endowment for the Humanities. $167.5 million annual savings.
•Hope VI Program.. $250 million annual savings.
•Amtrak Subsidies. $1.565 billion annual savings.
•Eliminate duplicative education programs. H.R. 2274 (in last Congress), authored by Rep. McKeon, eliminates 68 at a savings of $1.3 billion annually.
•U.S. Trade Development Agency. $55 million annual savings.
•Woodrow Wilson Center Subsidy. $20 million annual savings.
•Cut in half funding for congressional printing and binding. $47 million annual savings.
•John C. Stennis Center Subsidy. $430,000 annual savings.
•Community Development Fund. $4.5 billion annual savings.
•Heritage Area Grants and Statutory Aid. $24 million annual savings.
•Cut Federal Travel Budget in Half. $7.5 billion annual savings
•Trim Federal Vehicle Budget by 20%. $600 million annual savings.
•Essential Air Service. $150 million annual savings.
•Technology Innovation Program. $70 million annual savings.
•Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) Program. $125 million annual savings.
•Department of Energy Grants to States for Weatherization. $530 million annual savings.
•Beach Replenishment. $95 million annual savings.
•New Starts Transit. $2 billion annual savings.
•Exchange Programs for Alaska , Natives Native Hawaiians, and Their Historical Trading Partners in Massachusetts . $9 million annual savings
•Intercity and High Speed Rail Grants. $2.5 billion annual savings.
•Title X Family Planning. $318 million annual savings.
•Appalachian Regional Commission. $76 million annual savings.
•Economic Development Administration. $293 million annual savings.
•Programs under the National and Community Services Act. $1.15 billion annual savings.
•Applied Research at Department of Energy. $1.27 billion annual savings.
•FreedomCAR and Fuel Partnership. $200 million annual savings.
•Energy Star Program. $52 million annual savings.
•Economic Assistance to Egypt . $250 million annually.
•U.S. Agency for International Development. $1.39 billion annual savings.
•General Assistance to District of Columbia . $210 million annual savings.
•Subsidy for Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority. $150 million annual savings.
•Presidential Campaign Fund. $775 million savings over ten years.
•No funding for federal office space acquisition. $864 million annual savings.
•End prohibitions on competitive sourcing of government services.
•Repeal the Davis-Bacon Act. More than $1 billion annually.
•IRS Direct Deposit: Require the IRS to deposit fees for some services it offers (such as processing payment plans for taxpayers) to the Treasury, instead of allowing it to remain as part of its budget. $1.8 billion savings over ten years.
•Require collection of unpaid taxes by federal employees. $1 billion total savings.WHAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
•Prohibit taxpayer funded union activities by federal employees. $1.2 billion savings over ten years.
•Sell excess federal properties the government does not make use of. $15 billion total savings.
•Eliminate death gratuity for Members of Congress.
•Eliminate Mohair Subsidies. $1 million annual savings.
•Eliminate taxpayer subsidies to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. $12.5 million annual savings
•Eliminate Market Access Program. $200 million annual savings.
•USDA Sugar Program. $14 million annual savings.
•Subsidy to Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). $93 million annual savings.
•Eliminate the National Organic Certification Cost-Share Program. $56.2 million annual savings.
•Eliminate fund for Obamacare administrative costs. $900 million savings.
•Ready to Learn TV Program. $27 million savings..
•HUD Ph.D. Program.
•Deficit Reduction Check-Off Act.
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•TOTAL SAVINGS: $2.5 Trillion over Ten Years
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2)Roubini: ‘Perfect Storm’ May Rock World Economy by 2013
A “perfect storm” of fiscal woe in the U.S., a slowdown in China, European debt restructuring and stagnation in Japan may converge on the global economy, New York University professor Nouriel Roubini said.
There’s a one-in-three chance the factors will combine to stunt growth from 2013, Roubini, who predicted the global financial crisis, said in a June 11, interview in Singapore. Other possible outcomes are “anemic but OK” global growth or an “optimistic” scenario in which the expansion improves.
“There are already elements of fragility,” he said. “Everybody’s kicking the can down the road of too much public and private debt. The can is becoming heavier and heavier, and bigger on debt, and all these problems may come to a head by 2013 at the latest.”
Elevated U.S. unemployment, a surge in oil and food prices, rising interest rates in Asia and trade disruption from Japan’s record earthquake threaten to sap the world economy. Stocks worldwide have lost more than $3.3 trillion since the beginning of May, and Roubini said financial markets by the middle of next year could start worrying about a convergence of risks in 2013.
The MSCI AC World Index has tumbled 4.7 percent this month on concern recent data, including an increase in the U.S. unemployment rate to 9.1 percent in May, signal the global economy is losing steam. U.S. Treasuries rose last week, pushing two-year note yields down for a ninth week in the longest stretch of decreases since February 2008, on bets the Federal Reserve will maintain monetary stimulus.
Bond Market ‘Revolt’
World expansion may slow in the second half of 2011 as “the deleveraging process continues,” fiscal stimulus is withdrawn and confidence ebbs, Roubini also said.
In the U.S., a failure to address the budget deficit risks a bond market “revolt,” Roubini said. President Barack Obama’s administration has been negotiating with Republicans, who control the House of Representatives, over cutting the federal government’s long-term shortfall and raising the debt ceiling.
“We’re still running over a trillion-dollar budget deficit this year, next year and most likely in 2013,” Roubini said in a speech in Singapore on June 11. “The risk is at some point, the bond market vigilantes are going to wake up in the U.S., like they did in Europe, pushing interest rates higher and crowding out the recovery.”
In Europe, officials need to restructure the debt of Greece, Ireland and Portugal, and waiting too long may result in a “more disorderly” process, Roubini also said.
Greece’s Struggle
European officials are racing to find a plan to stem Greece’s debt crisis by June 24 while sharing the cost of a new rescue with bondholders. Saddled with the euro area’s heaviest debt load, Greece is seeking additional loans after last year’s 110 billion-euro ($159 billion) bailout.
Japan’s economy, the world’s third-largest, slid into a recession last quarter after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami and ensuing nuclear crisis. The government is spending an initial 4 trillion yen ($50 billion) to clean up from the disaster, which is estimated to have caused as much as 25 trillion yen in economic damage.
Bank of Japan Governor Masaaki Shirakawa said on June 1 that supply constraints are easing faster than expected as companies rush to repair their facilities. The risk in Japan is “if growth fizzles out after a short-term reconstruction stimulus,” leading to a renewed struggle to maintain expansion around 2013, Roubini said.
China’s economy may face a “hard landing” after 2013 as government efforts to boost growth through investment cause excess capacity, Roubini told reporters.
‘Overcapacity’ in China
“China is now relying increasingly not just on net exports but on fixed investment” which has climbed to about 50 percent of gross domestic product, he said. “Down the line, you are going to have two problems: a massive non-performing loan problem in the banking system and a massive amount of overcapacity is going to lead to a hard landing.”
A record $2.7 trillion of loans were extended in China over two years, pushing property prices to all-time highs even as authorities set price ceilings, demanded higher deposits and limited second-home purchases.
The nation’s current challenge is to maintain growth and curb price gains ahead of a leadership change next year, Roubini said. Officials may use administrative steps and price controls, as well as raising rates further and allowing currency appreciation, if inflation becomes a bigger problem, he said.
“The policy challenge through next year, where you have a delicate political transition of the leadership, is to maintain growth in the 8 to 9 percent range while pushing inflation below what it is right now,” said Roubini, the co-founder and chairman of New York-based Roubini Global Economics LLC.
After next year, the bigger challenge in China is “to reduce fixed investment and savings and increase consumption. Otherwise after 2013, there will be a hard landing,” he said.
Roubini in July 2006 predicted a “catastrophic” global financial meltdown that central bankers would be unable to prevent. The collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in 2008 sparked turmoil that led to the worst financial crisis since the 1930s.
© Copyright 2011 Bloomberg News. All rights reserved.
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3)U.S. Department of Justice W E B S I T E C H A N G E - I M P O R T A N T!
Little by little subtle changes happen until - one day we will wake up and be the United Socialist States of America.
2012 is just around the corner so get and stay engaged as if our nation depended on it because it does!!!!!
...always important to watch what is going on behind the scenes!!!
The U.S. Department of Justice ditches red, white, and blue stars and stripes.
Well, how interesting! It seems the U.S. Department of Justice has changed its web site. Gone are the colorful red, white, and blue U.S. Flag decorations on the page,
Replaced by stark black and white and at the top of the page, is a rather interesting quote: "The common law is the will of mankind, issuing from the life of the people."
Catchy, huh? Just one tiny, too small to be relevant, point --the quote is from C. Wilfred Jenks, who in the 1930's was a leading proponent of the "international law" movement, which had as its goal to impose a global common law and which backed 'global workers' rights.'
Call it Marxism, call it Progressivism, call it Socialism -- under any of those names, it definitely makes the new DOJ suspect with Marxist accessories to match.
Interesting, Holder could not find an adequate quote from one of our Founders. Is this an example of the slow, methodical misuse of power the current "regime" quietly executed and leading us to socialism and destroying our Republic as we have known and liked it?
Go to the site yourself and confirm it!
http://www.justice.gov/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------4)Moral Inversion in U.S.
Foreign Policy
The wrong U.S. responses to the Mideast upheavals are not just perverse, they’re dangerous.
By Ira Straus
It is a curious pattern. When Qaddafi and Assad came under attack, our elites — foreign-affairs journals, major media, government officials — warned of dire destabilizing consequences if they should fall. When Ben Ali and Mubarak came under attack, our elites said their downfall was inevitable and warned of dire destabilizing consequences if they failed to leave.
A normal instinct would be to rejoice at the prospect of the fall of foes and to warn of dire consequences if our friends fall. Our actual behavior — nearly universal behavior across all high-level sectors, from media to government to NGOs — has been the exact opposite.
An indiscriminate neutral peace-lover would oppose (and a neutral revolution-lover favor) all the revolutions equally. We have not been neutralist; we have been on the other side.
Specific reasons can be given for the response in each instance, but it would be a mistake to dwell on them; it would amount to joining in a self-mystification. The pattern is what counts. It is what reveals the operationally significant cause: the pre-existing orientation. Case-specific explanations are always available for any policy going in either direction; when they are selected to fit a pre-set orientation, they tell nothing about the actual motivation.
The pattern is obvious: against our friends and our interests. It is as if we are so scared of the accusations of having a normal double standard in our own favor that we lean over backwards and adopt a double standard against ourselves. The Qaddafi and Assad regimes have been brutal tyrannies, and often brutally hostile to us. Ben Ali and Mubarak were mild, stable, modernizing rulers, solid actors for peace, and our reliable friends. The case could not be clearer for treating the latter pair better than the former. We have done the opposite. We need to ask: Why?
I am dealing here only with the urgently important current examples. However, for analytical purposes, it is important to realize that this is not a new phenomenon at all. There are repeated examples of it, providing ample social-science confirmation of the immediate causal determinant: an inversion of attitudes toward friend and foe. I remember well, as an old Sovietologist, how in the 1980s there was some scholarly speculation on the problems and instabilities that an end of Communism could bring; yet at the same time it was taboo to discuss an end to Communism as a scenario to plan for, much less wish for. How to explain this seeming contradiction?
Only a few scholars broke the taboo, notably Alexander Yanov, a Soviet refugee; and under his inspiration, I did likewise. We both did it under the cover of discussing how to prepare for dealing constructively with the dangers it would present, not of explicitly calling for it. President Reagan broke the taboo more completely, saying that Communism should and would end soon; and he was almost unanimously labeled a dangerous, ignorant rube for it. No one apologized when he proved right. He and his adviser Richard Pipes were actually accused of intending to start a nuclear war to end Communism. Reagan joked about the slander; the slanderers, relentless from their unanimous perch in the media, managed to portray this as a confirmation that they were right, and succeeded in getting him to apologize to them for it. Pipes suffered the same slander from Washington Star and Post columnist Mary McGrory, among others; Reagan eventually had to let Pipes go. There were real costs: The West was unprepared for dealing with the emerging new issues when Communism was coming to an end in 1989–91, and got around only to a half-hearted program of help in 1992.
But let us come back to the question: Why the contradiction — speculating on the dangers in a demise of the Soviet regime, but not on the opportunities in it? It seems the operational cause was the very fact that it was an enemy regime. Change the object to a friendly and much milder regime, like that of, say, Ferdinand Marcos, and the behavior was the opposite: Practically everyone welcomed his overthrow; no one expressed concern about instability from it, or about our “dangerous,” “belligerent” attitude toward him, or proclaimed his “moral equivalence” to us as an antidote to our “arrogance.”
Even al-Jazeera noticed our double standard in Qaddafi’s favor, compared to the way we treated Mubarak and Ben Ali. But it could not draw the obvious conclusion: that it was a double standard against ourselves. It tried instead to fit it into its usual practice of accusing us of self-interested double standards. Secretary Clinton, fearing this accusation, argued against intervention lest we fit into the Arab Street narrative about our acting with double standards in our own interest. It was a revealing comment on what it is that is feared in our official conscience. Later we did intervene, our misdirected conscience protected by stipulations that are meant to neuter the action — and that bring a real moral cost in stalemate and protracted killing.
When the Qaddafi and Assad regimes fight back, it is said that this shows they have some support in society. When the Mubarak and Ben Ali regimes — much broader-based regimes (a Western polling agency found at the height of the Egyptian demonstrations that Mubarak and Suleiman were the preferred presidential candidates of a full third of the population) — yield to our insistence that they shouldn’t put up a fight, we say they have no support.
When Mubarak mentions the obvious fact that the opposition includes our enemies, we brand anyone who says anything at all against the Muslim Brotherhood as an agent of Mubarak’s fearmongering. When Qaddafi says his opponents are al-Qaeda, Secretary Clinton wonders aloud for weeks on end if this is true, and uses it as a reason not to intervene.
Mubarak and Ben Ali, having fallen, are persecuted personally. We join in some of the persecution.
Mubarak’s party is forced to disband, in order to appease the street crowd, which seems more and more like a vengeful mob; so is Ben Ali’s party. We do not oppose these anti-democratic actions, or even criticize them; instead, some of our democracy-promotion structures, which have been training the revolutionaries, explain such “distancing” actions as necessary for revolutionary “success.” President Obama meanwhile makes demands for unbanning the Islamist organizations and letting them participate fully in politics.
In other words: We insist on full involvement of our enemies in the name of democracy, but we accept, even encourage, the undemocratic exclusion of our friends. It is as if, after 1945, we had banned the German moderate parties, not the Nazis.
We know the Muslim Brotherhood well; the evidence of its enmity is ample: enmity to ourselves specifically, and enmity ideologically to the liberal norms that make democracy something positive for human freedom and development. Our media and leadership have avoided this basic point, instead endlessly repeating the line that Americans have a “simplistic” “narrative” against the Muslim Brotherhood, and that “it’s more complicated.” Of course things are always “more complicated” than any overall conclusion. The question is: Why do we pull out this “more complicated” line on highly select occasions, usually to excuse our enemies? Are we afraid of seeing the forest and prefer to have the trees get in the way? Is there a “culture wars” aspect — do some people feel it confirms their status as elite if they call the American people “crude” and “simplistic”?
It is important that we figure out the reasons for our behavior. Why do we vilify benign rulers and excuse malicious ones? Why do we treat friends worse than enemies? Why, in sum, do we think with an inverted mind and act with an inverted morality?
It matters. It does harm on a global scale. It is not just a minor social-status game.
One explanation is that some people feel guilty for anything done by rulers who are our friends. Our intelligentsia, like our enemies abroad, call our friends our “puppets” and blame us for what they do, or are said to do. (In the present case, it is worth reminding ourselves that the Mubarak regime, regularly called a “U.S. puppet” in recent months, was an outgrowth of the Nasser-Sadat regime. That regime was created by Nasser’s army-based coup; it was anti-Western nationalist, and was based always on the army. Sadat turned the regime from sentimental, self-destructive anti-Western nationalism to pursuit of Egypt’s actual national interest. That is the reason why he was assassinated by the Islamists; and why anti-Western nationalists and Islamists have called him — and Mubarak, who continued his policy — a U.S. puppet.)
It is the opposite with regimes that are unfriendly to us; we feel able to ignore our guilt for their crimes, no matter what our role in creating or sustaining them. Carter felt guilty for the thousands of Communists imprisoned by the Shah, but felt no guilt when they — and many more thousands of others — were shot by the Ayatollah. The Ayatollah was our enemy; our enemies wouldn’t blame us for his sins; so why feel guilty for him? Wasn’t it a proof of our sinless selflessness that we helped bring him to power? But it was not selfless, just self-destructive. There was a selfish pride in feeling selfless. There was sin in facilitating — for the selfish purpose of avoiding accusations from our enemies — a massive increase in cruelty, and damage to the entire world order.
This is not an unusual situation. It is the ordinary one. The West is the core of the world order. It is also the most evolved and mildly governed society in the world. The regimes friendly to it are, as a rule, the ones that play a constructive role in the world order and, in most cases, the more mildly governed ones in their region. Feeling guilty over their shortcomings, and guiltless over the far worse evils of the less Western-oriented forces in their regions, is bound to lead time after time to moral inversion; and with it, to actual policies that are morally criminal as well as self-damaging.
This wrong sensibility explains the paradoxical dishonesty of the media on double standards — seizing on any pretext, no matter how feeble, for accusing us of a double standard in our favor; ignoring it when we lack such a normal double standard, or when we apply a harmful double standard against ourselves.
But what is the source of this perversion of the moral sensibility? It raises difficult questions because it keeps recurring, impervious to the experience of the evil it does both to our own country and to the world at large. Is it motivated only by feelings of guilt for “our” sins, or by aggressiveness against our society, which is called “us” but viewed as the enemy? Is there an element of projection, expiating a sense of personal guilt by punishing one’s society at large?
The phenomenon was analyzed decades ago by several major scholars. Prof. Jeane Kirkpatrick, in her essay “Dictatorships and Double Standards.” James Burnham, former philosophy professor, in the chapters on “Guilt” and “The Dialectic of Liberalism” in The Suicide of the West: how recent liberal doctrine implies an inexpiable Western guilt before the Third World; how liberal society tends to identify with the Left as “us,” feeling bad when crossing the Left, feeling good when attacking the Right and the West, proposing indirect strategies for the West that consist in the here and now of attacking the interests of “our side.” Prof. Paul Hollander, in Understanding Anti-Americanism: our cultivation of negative self-image, which affects the society’s future. Prof. Lewis Feuer, a Freudian socio-psychologist, in The Conflict of Generations and subsequent books: the inward redirection of the normal stock of societal aggressiveness; the alienation of the societal superego to the Left; the inducing of guilt in the mainstream.
Do we need to reread their works? Do we need a new Lewis Feuer to update the analysis of our self-damage? Do we need a new Jeane Kirkpatrick to rouse society against the “blame America first” mentality?
Only by understanding our mental inversion can we figure out how to right it. And we need to right it. Before our eyes in the Middle East, it is having exceedingly dangerous consequences.
— Ira Straus is executive director of The Democracy International, and U.S. coordinator of the Committee on Eastern Europe and Russia in NATO. The views expressed here are his own.
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