Subj: God's Plan
While creating wives, God promised men that good and obedient wives would be found in all corners of the world.
And then He smiled and made the earth round.
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At the Irish wedding reception the D.J. yelled...
"Would all married men please stand next to the
one person who has made your life worth living."
The bartender was almost crushed to death.
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one person who has made your life worth living."
The bartender was almost crushed to death.
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Give a man a fish and he eats for a day.
Give a man a welfare check, a forty ounce malt liquor, a crack pipe
and some Air Jordan's and he votes Democrat for a lifetime.
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Henninger pokes fun at Obama's virtual economy. (See 1 below.)
Obama gives with one hand and takes more back with both. (See 1a below.)
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George Will goes to the heart of what is wrong with both Santorum and Romney. They are miscasting themselves and their pitch for both the nomination and the election. Woe is the Republican Party. The only hope is that Obama beats himself which I believe he is more than capable of doing notwithstanding his cleverness.(See 2 below.)
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Christie fed up with Buffett as well he should be. Amazing how as some people get older they believe their brilliance in one field is transferable to another. (See 3 below.)
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This retired military officer fed up with Obama's muzzling . (See 4 below.)
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Obama's gadfly - Valerie Jarrett- has a solution for the economic mess in which we find ourselves. More unemployment! (See 5 below.)
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My friend, Avi Jorisch, suggests Obama could impose "SWIFT" and that would deal a knock out blow to Iran financially.
Obama has no intention of knocking out Iran financially and/or militarily because , as I have written before and D'Souza has confirmed, his anti-colonial philosophy and his weakness of character restrain him from being truly serious.
D'Souza characterizes Obama as being a toy soldier who, when he walks into a wall, just keeps on walking. He sees himself as on a righteous course and thus will not change. (See 6 below.)
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Whose fooling who? (See 7 below.)
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This gem appeared on Walter Russell Mead's blog site.
IF GW WERESTILLPRESIDENT THE PRESS AND MEDIA WOULD BE SCREAMING GASOLINE PRICES BUT THE "OBAMA CHORUS' ARE THERE TO PROTECT HIM. (See 8 below.)
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LOUIS WOODHILL WOULD HAVE US BELIEVE IT IS NOT THAT THE MOUNTAIN IS SO HIGH IT IS THAT THE LAND IS SO LOW. (SEE 9 BELOW.)
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This gem appeared on Walter Russell Mead's blog site.
IF GW WERESTILLPRESIDENT THE PRESS AND MEDIA WOULD BE SCREAMING GASOLINE PRICES BUT THE "OBAMA CHORUS' ARE THERE TO PROTECT HIM. (See 8 below.)
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LOUIS WOODHILL WOULD HAVE US BELIEVE IT IS NOT THAT THE MOUNTAIN IS SO HIGH IT IS THAT THE LAND IS SO LOW. (SEE 9 BELOW.)
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Dick
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It's endless fun, fiddling with the dials on the real world.
By DANIEL HENNINGER
If you were a president who for three years presided over an economy with more than 13 million unemployed, a growth rate gasping around 2%, an historic credit downgrade and underwater home mortgages drifting like icebergs toward the American Titanic, what would you do?
With his recently announced campaign platform—An Economy Built to Last—President Obama has essentially constructed a virtual economy. Instead of the economy we all live in, he's making one up and inviting us to pretend we are living in it. Welcome to the Sim City Economy.
Sim City, one of the most popular products ever in the imaginary world of video games, lets players bring to life towns of their own devising in great detail. It's endless fun, fiddling with the dials on the real world.
In his State of the Union Address, Mr. Obama described what will be a major claim of his re-election campaign—that he renewed the American dream by bailing out General Motors. About the defensibility of this policy we can argue. But as is his wont, Mr. Obama erected a generalized theory of social betterment atop this one event. "What's happening in Detroit can happen in other industries." Mr. Obama announced. "It can happen in Cleveland and Pittsburgh and Raleigh."
It can?
What's interesting about this claim is that the corridor between Cleveland and Pittsburgh, much of it economically moribund for years, is experiencing a rebirth thanks to real economic forces, not a president who types in the name of another beleaguered city and hits Ctrl-Shift-Enter to solve its problems.
Most of this revival is taking place around the godforsaken city of Youngstown, Ohio, and the formerly dying steel towns west of Pittsburgh, an area better known today as the Marcellus Shale Natural Gas Field. Last summer, a French steel company, Vallourec & Mannesmann Holdings Inc., began construction on a new $650 million plant to make steel tubes for the hydraulic fracking industry. About 400 workers are building it. Nothing Barack Obama has done in three years—not the $800 billion stimulus or anything in his four, $3 trillion-plus budgets—is remotely related to the better times in Ohio and Pennsylvania.
But other than grudging acknowledgment of the private entrepreneurs' natural-gas success, don't expect to hear the carbon-based word "fracking" much in the president's stump speech when he paints in the numbers of the American economy as he imagines it. That pitch will run more toward the ideas in the Presidential Memorandum released this Tuesday, directing the Department of Agriculture to put in motion a program called "Promoting a Bioeconomy."
The Obama Bioeconomy will come to life after the Ag Department "increases the purchase of biobased products" under a program that originated in the 2002 farm bill. After mandating a 50% increase in products designated as biobased, "items like paints, soaps and detergents . . . are developed from farm grown plants, rather than chemicals or petroleum bases." This, the president says, "will drive innovation and economic growth and create jobs at marginal cost to the American public."
You can't make this up. On the other hand, that's the point: You can make this up, and then sell it, or try to sell it, as An Economy Built to Last.
The announcement Tuesday of the impending Bioeconomy was of course overwhelmed that day by the president's White House speech celebrating Congress's one-year extension of his payroll tax cut. This was the biggest economic policy event in Washington the past two months. The president himself announced the payoff for the American people: "It means $40 extra in their paycheck." Sounds real, but barely.
Moments later, he drew attention to an initiative "we passed" that will "create jobs by expanding wireless broadband and ensuring that first responders have access to the latest lifesaving technologies." When Newt makes claims like this, he's nuts; with Barack Obama, it's a vision.
A cynic might argue that none of these pretend ideas for reviving a $15 trillion economy in the second term matters much because the lasting damage was done in the first term, with ObamaCare's redo of the health sector—16% of the economy—and Dodd-Frank, which even the bureaucrats asked to write things like the Volcker Rule admit they can't figure out.
A cynic might say further that much of what Mr. Obama is outputting from his laptop for the next four years are pop-gun ideas or phantom tax policy. The Buffett Rule will never become a real law. On Wednesday Mr. Obama proposed an array of corporate tax changes—some up, some down—but as the reporting noted repeatedly, with virtually "no specifics." Ctrl-Alt-Delete. The scheme to revive manufacturing—taxes overseas that are reprogrammed into domestic hires—would challenge even Sim City's programmers.
Cynical resignation and a president living in a videogame economy aren't what the U.S. needs at this turn in history. The biggest burden on this week's two Republican front-runners, Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney, will be to describe—in detail—what really happened to the U.S. economy the past three years. Against that reality, Mr. Obama will repeat until November that he wants an economy "where everyone plays by the same set of rules." If he's writing them, it may not compute.
1a)Obama's Tax Reform Muddle
He endorses lower corporate rates but raises taxes overall.
Yesterday's release of the White House "Business Tax Reform" marks a watershed in the corporate tax debate. Now nearly everyone acknowledges that U.S. corporate tax rates hurt American companies. The headline that President Obama wants voters to see is his new top statutory rate of 28%. If only the story ended there . . .
Alas, his reform is stuffed with so many offsetting business tax increases that the overall impact of this and other proposals would make the U.S. tax system less globally competitive and raise effective tax rates above what they are today.
But let's start by praising what Mr. Obama gets right. He's spot on in acknowledging that the U.S. "statutory tax rate [35%] will soon be the highest among advanced countries" and that the "relatively narrow tax base and a high statutory tax rate" create a tax system that "is uncompetitive and inefficient." What do you know, tax rates matter.
Cutting the rate to 28% would leave the U.S. above an international average closer to 25%-27%, but it is still welcome. The White House is also right that the current tax code favors debt over equity financing.
The problem is that the tax increases in this and other Obama proposals would add new layers of inequity and inefficiency to the tax code. One principle of tax reform is to create neutrality within and across industries—a level playing field. As the White House proposal puts it, the current code "distorts choices such as where to produce, what to invest in, how to finance a business, and what business form to use."
But then the plan ignores that advice and picks winners and losers. It offers a sweetheart 25% rate for certain manufacturers and even lower for "advanced manufacturing," which would invite a lobbying free-for-all in Congress. Meanwhile, the plan punishes those the White House doesn't like, such as companies in oil and gas or with operations abroad.
But how is a company that makes computer hardware any more deserving of lower rates than one that makes computer software? Why does the company that makes the paper for this newspaper deserve a lower tax rate than the company that publishes the newspaper?
The oil and gas industry has led manufacturers in job creation for four years and already pays at or near the highest effective federal tax rate of any industry. Yet the President's tax plan raises its taxes but retains (as best we can tell) the credits and other giveaways to his supporters in green energy.
The plan also takes a mercantile view of trade by raising taxes on U.S. corporations doing business abroad but cutting taxes on foreign companies that operate in the U.S. Since about 80% of global business is overseas, it's not clear how this taxing scheme would make American firms more competitive.
Mr. Obama's goal is to stop outsourcing and return operations to the U.S. But the main effect would be for U.S. multinational firms to become German, Chinese or Swiss, and thus exempt from the uncompetitive U.S. taxing regime. The best way to prevent outsourcing is to get U.S. tax rates on capital and corporate profits as low as possible.
Other distortions abound. This week Mr. Obama proposes a 28% rate for corporations, but last week he endorsed a 41% tax rate on nearly 30 million businesses that are not corporations and thus pay profits taxes as personal income. (See above.)
Even the boasts of tax simplicity are overstated. One of the biggest revenue raisers in the plan is a new "global minimum tax" applied to corporations, which means Ford and Apple would get to fill out another set of tax forms. Such a tax is likely to lead to the same complexities, extra compliance costs and headaches as the hated Alternative Minimum Tax has for individuals.
What the White House reformers don't like to admit is that corporate profits are taxed twice—first, via the corporate tax, then again at the shareholder level through the dividend or capital gains levies. Mr. Obama wants to cut the top corporate tax rate by 20% but raise the capital gains tax by almost 60% and nearly triple the dividend rate.
This means overall taxes on most owners of the company (except tax-exempt entities and foreign owners) would be higher. When including the corporate tax, the total tax burden on dividend income today can reach as high as about 45%. Under Mr. Obama's various tax proposals, the burden would be closer to 58%. Such a deal.
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Republicans in Congress should take the 28% corporate tax rate as the opening bid and scrap most of the rest of his plan. Or better yet, apply the 25% corporate rate that Mr. Obama wants for manufacturers to all industries. The President has acknowledged that America's corporate tax code is a Head Start program for international rivals. Someone else needs to write a reform that is more concerned with growth than with government industrial policy.
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2)Santorum and Romney are miscast as candidates
By George F. Will
The Midwest begins on the western slopes of the Allegheny Mountains, around Rick Santorum’s Pittsburgh, birthplace of the Ohio River, the original highway into the Midwest. Pittsburgh fueled the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, an early eruption of Western resentment of the overbearing East, which taxed the whiskey that Westerners made from their grain. Santorum the Midwesterner, after victories in Iowa, Minnesota and Missouri, is wagering more of his political capital on the region.
Rather than wait for the congenial calendar of Super Tuesday (March 6), featuring five culturally conservative states (Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, Oklahoma, Idaho), he is contesting Michigan, which votes Tuesday, and Ohio. But instead of keeping his Rust Belt focus on his blue-collar roots and economic program for reviving manufacturing, he has opened multiple fronts in the culture wars.
By doing so — questioning much prenatal testing, disdaining Barack Obama’s environmentalism as “phony theology,” calling involvement of even state governments in public education “anachronistic,” reiterating that abortion should be illegal even in cases of rape and incest, explaining the proper purpose of sex (procreation) — Santorum has eclipsed Newt Gingrich, his rival for the support of social conservatives. But in doing so Santorum has made his Catholicism more central and problematic in this nomination contest than Romney’s Mormonism has been.
The problem is not that the phenomena that trouble Santorum are unserious. The use of prenatal testing for search-and-destroy missions against Down syndrome and other handicapped babies is barbaric. Obama’s stealthy pursuit of a national curriculum for kindergarten through 12th grade is ill-advised and illegal. And no domestic problem — not even the unsustainable entitlement state — is more urgent and intractable than that of family disintegration.
The entitlement state can be reformed by various known — if currently politically impossible — policy choices. But no one really knows the causes of family disintegration, so it is unclear whether those causes can be combated by government measures.
We do know the social pathologies flowing from the fact that now more than 50 percent of all babies born to women under age 30 are born to unmarried mothers. These pathologies, related to a constantly renewed cohort of adolescent males without fathers at home, include disorderly neighborhoods, schools that cannot teach, mass incarceration and the intergenerational transmission of poverty. We do not know how to address this with government policies, even though the nation has worried about it for almost 50 years.
In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then in President Lyndon Johnson’s administration, published his report on the black family’s “crisis,” which was that 24 percent of black children were then born to unmarried women. Today, 73 percent are. Forty-one percent of all children are now born to unmarried women.
Moynihan, a social scientist in politics, proposed various family policies but also noted this: When the medieval invention of distilling was combined with Britain’s 18th-century surplus of grain, the result was cheap gin — and appalling pockets of social regression. The most effective response to which was not this or that government policy, it was John Wesley — Methodism. Which brings us back to Santorum.
He is an engagingly happy warrior, except when he is not. Then he is an angry prophet of a dystopian future in which, he has warned, people will be “holed up in their homes afraid to go outside at night.” He has the right forebodings but might have the wrong profession. Presidential candidates do not thrive as apostles of social regeneration; they are expected to be as sunny as Ronald Reagan was as he assured voters that they were as virtuous as their government was tedious.
Today’s Republican contest has become a binary choice between two similarly miscast candidates. Mitt Romney cannot convince voters that he understands the difference between business and politics, between being a CEO and the president. To bring economic rationality to an underperforming economic entity requires understanding a market segment. To bring confidence to a discouraged nation requires celebrating its history and sketching an inspiring destiny this history has presaged.
Romney is right about the futility of many current policies, but being offended by irrationality is insufficient. Santorum is right to be alarmed by many cultural trends but implies that religion must be the nexus between politics and cultural reform. Romney is not attracting people who want rationality leavened by romance. Santorum is repelling people who want politics unmediated by theology.
Neither Romney nor Santorum looks like a formidable candidate for November.
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4)NJ's Christie: Obama 'Using' Buffett as Tool for U.S. Tax Policy
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said President Barack Obama is “using” such people as billionaire investor Warren Buffett as tools to push his tax policy.
Christie, who has endorsed Mitt Romney for president, also said during a round of television interviews today that the former Massachusetts governor needs to show more emotion if he is to win the Republican primary.
Christie’s comments about Obama came after he said this week that Buffett, who has called for the nation’s wealthiest people to pay more taxes, should “just write a check and shut up.”
Buffett, chief executive officer of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., has said he pays 17.4 percent on taxable income. His secretary, Debbie Bosanek, and other staff members pay an average 34 percent rate.
“You’re using this guy, you’re using his secretary — who’s one of the best-paid secretaries in America, apparently — you’re using these people to try to make a point about redistribution of wealth,” Christie, 49, a Republican midway through his first term, said during an interview on “Fox & Friends.”
Obama has called for a minimum rate of 30 percent for those with incomes of $1 million or more and dubbed the idea “the Buffett Rule.” The president has pointed to the different rates of Buffett and his secretary as an example of an unfair tax code, and Bosanek was at his State of the Union address last month. Recent presidents have often had guests at their speeches to make policy points.
Buffett Rule
Carrie Kizer, Buffett’s assistant, didn’t return an e-mail seeking comment on Christie’s statements. White House press secretary Jay Carney dismissed Christie’s comment about Buffett when asked about it yesterday at a briefing.
“That’s a quip that tries to draw attention away from what is a very serious issue, which is the need to have a tax code that’s fair,” Carney said. “Quips aside, we think the Buffett Rule is absolutely an important principle to apply to individual tax reform.”
Christie on Feb. 21 introduced a $32.1 billion spending plan that includes a 10 percent income-tax cut for every New Jersey resident, business-tax reductions and a $1.1 billion pension contribution, the biggest in state history.
Michigan Primary
During today’s media appearances, Christie was asked mostly about national political issues. He said a loss for Romney in Michigan’s Feb. 28 Republican primary would be “bad news” though the candidate wouldn’t be in trouble. Romney’s father was a Michigan governor and chairman of now-defunct American Motors Corp., and his son has criticized the federal bailout of the auto industry, crucial to that state’s economy.
There was no “knockout winner” in the Republican debate last night in Arizona, Christie said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program. Rick Santorum wasn’t prepared and turned in an “awful” performance, he said.
Romney’s “reserved” nature is not playing well with voters, and he must show his emotions and passion in order to win the primary, Christie told Don Imus.
There is about a 10 percent chance of a brokered Republican nominating convention, said Christie, who added that he was certain the nominee would be Romney. The term refers to a selection process where no clear majority candidate emerges after an initial delegation vote, and the nomination is the result of deals among party leaders.
Christie last year turned down entreaties from party leaders and donors to enter the Republican presidential primary race. He is the top choice of Republicans if the party nominates its presidential candidate at a brokered convention, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released yesterday. The governor, asked by Imus what he would do if leaders pass on Romney, said he would have “some thinking to do.”
“I don’t have an idea at the moment,” Christie said. “Listen, if it gets to that point, you know me. I’m not a wallflower. I’ll take a position, but I don’t have one now.
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4)Obama stops soldier from speaking.
Something you'll want to be aware of: Obama stops soldier from speaking ..Sent by Retired Vice Admiral Bob Scarborough, of Arlington , Va. "I wanted to give you all some disturbing information on our wonderful president. I work with the Catch-A-Dream Foundation, which provides hunting and fishing trips to children with life-threatening illnesses. This past weekend we had our annual banquet/fundraiser event in Starkville . As a part of our program, we had scheduled Sgt. 1st Class Greg Stube to come; he's a highly decorated U.S. Army Green Beret and inspirational speaker who was severely injured while deployed overseas and didn't have much of a chance for survival. Greg is stationed at Ft. Bragg , NC and received permission from his commanding officer to come speak at our function. Everything was on go until Obama made a policy that NO U.S. SERVICEMAN CAN SPEAK AT ANY FAITH-BASED PUBLIC EVENTS ANYMORE. Needless to say, Greg had to cancel his speaking event with us. Didn't know if anyone else was aware of this new policy. You're just starting to see the Obamanation. This is just how the Nazis did it in the 1930s -- slowly, one step at a time. This should be forwarded to everyone regardless of party affiliation! We have lost 50% of our freedom of speech in the last 2 years. The news media is not allowed to print anything negative about this evil Obama.
ARE YOU STILL GOING TO RE-ELECT HIM???????????
--
Robert D.
Sinacola
COL (Ret), AVN, USAR
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------5)Valerie Jarrett: Unemployment Stimulates the Economy
White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett has adopted a stance on unemployment that is sure to infuriate many, arguing that it stimulates the economy because people who receive unemployment checks are going out and spending them, reports The Weekly Standard.
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"It not only is good for the family, but it’s good for the economy,” Jarrett argued during a speaking engagement at North Carolina Central University in Durham, North Carolina.
“People who receive that unemployment check go out and spend it and help stimulate the economy, so that’s healthy as well,”
© Newsmax. All rights reserved.
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7)
A SWIFT Iranian Knockout Blow
By Avi Jorisch
Last week, one of the most important international banking organizations said it was preparing to ban blacklisted Iranian banks for their role in facilitating illicit financial transactions. Although existing international sanctions have placed significant pressure on Tehran, the United States and the European Union have the ability to render a knockout blow that would significantly curtail Iran's access to the international financial sector.
The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, also known as SWIFT, is a banking cooperative owned by its member financial institutions. It is used by banks around the world to debit and credit money. The vast majority of global interbank transfers are routed through the SWIFT network, and nearly every bank in the world uses SWIFT to move funds globally. As ofJanuary 2011, SWIFT linked more than 9,500 financial institutions, in 210 countries and territories, and facilitated over 17 million transfers daily. SWIFT is headquartered in Belgium and has offices in the world's major financial centers, including a very large presence in New York.
Iran relies heavily on SWIFT to move its funds and to finance its nuclear program, proliferate terrorism, and repress its own people. According to the organization's own documentation, all of Iran's domestic banks are connected to SWIFT, and in 2010, they sent 1.16 million messages and received 1.1 million, each of which represents movement of money. As of February 2010, Iranian financial institutions, including branches, departments, and head offices, possessed 675 SWIFT codes, which act as unique identifiers and allows Iran to manipulate the global financial market.
As the international community implements robust sanctions against Iran, SWIFT has been in breach of the sanctions regime, along with U.S. and European laws. Beginning in 2007, the UN ordered member states to cease doing business under any circumstances with Iran's Bank Sepah and its affiliates and also placed restrictions on two other Iranian banks, Melli and Saderat. Most recently, the UN designated the First East Export Bank, located in Malaysia, and Australia, Canada, and the EU have published a list of illicit Iranian banks. For its part, the United States has formally designated those named at the UN, as well as another sixteen Iranian banks for their role proliferating weapons of mass destruction and terrorism. The U.S. also blacklisted every Iranian bank specifically for engaging in money laundering. All of the Iranian banks designated by the U.S. and Europe have SWIFT Codes.
SWIFT has even in violation of its own corporate rules, which clearly state that services "should not be used to facilitate illegal activities." Furthermore, both the United States and Europe, by blacklisting Iranian financial institutions for their role in terrorism finance and money laundering, have provided SWIFT with sufficient reasons to prevent sanctioned Iranian banks from having access to the international financial sector.
Some might argue that SWIFT must provide unfettered access to everyone, since excluding any country, no matter how nefarious, would endanger access for all. Others will claim that powerful countries like the United States could use SWIFT as a political tool. Yet it is clear that Iran, by abusing its financial sector to help sponsor terrorism, achieve nuclearization, and facilitate criminal activity, has by any reasonable standard lost its right to move money freely around the globe.
SWIFT announced last Friday that it "stands ready to act and discontinue its services to sanctioned Iranian financial institutions as soon as it has clarity on EU legislation currently being drafted." But because SWIFT has a presence in both the U.S and EU, it is subject to both jurisdictions' laws, and therefore should cut off all blacklisted institutions. Simply put, since all Iranian banks are engaging in criminal activity, SWIFT has the responsibility and the ability to cut off Iran and hamper its ability to abuse the international financial sector.
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7)US, France, UK, Turkey, Italy prepare for military intervention in Syria
Secret Homs press center
Despite public denials, military preparations for intervention in the horrendous Syrian crisis are quietly afoot in Washington, Paris, Rome, London and Ankara. President Barack Obama is poised for a final decision after the Pentagon submits operational plans for protecting Syrian rebels and beleaguered populations from the brutal assaults of Bashar Assad’s army.
This process is also underway in allied capitals which joined the US in the Libyan operation that ended Muammar Qaddafi’s rule in August, 2011. They are waiting for a White House decision before going forward.
In Libya, foreign intervention began as an operation to protect the Libyan population against its ruler’s outrageous crackdown on dissent. It was mandated by UN Security Council. There is no chance of this in the Syrian case because it will be blocked by a Russian veto. Therefore, Western countries are planning military action of limited scope outside the purview of the world body, possibly on behalf of “Friends of Syria,” a group of 80 world nations which meets for the first time in Tunis Friday, Feb. 24, to hammer out practical steps for terminating the bloodbath pursued by the Assad regime.
The foreign ministers and senior officials – Russia has excluded itself – will certainly be further galvanized into action by the tragic deaths of two notable journalists Wednesday, Feb. 22, on the 19th day of the shelling of Homs.
Preparations for the event are taking place at the Foreign Office in London. Wednesday, Foreign Secretary William Hague said: Governments around the world have the responsibility to act…and to redouble our efforts to stop the Assad regime’s despicable campaign of terror.”
Hague pointedly said nothing about removing the Syrian ruler. Nor did he spell out the efforts need to stop the campaign of terror. Military sources note he left these issues open because a decision by President Obama about if and how the US will act is pending until the Pentagon submits operational plans to Commander-in-Chief Obama.
The US president is also waiting for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s report on the mood at the Tunis conference. He wants to know in particular if Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar and the UAR will support US-led Western intervention in Syria, both politically and financially.
The Sunday Times correspondent Marie Colvin and the French Figaro video-photographer Remi Ochik died Wednesday in the heavy shelling of a fortified building which housed Western journalists making their way into Homs under the protection of Syrian rebels. Three other Western journalists were injured. Western military sources reported Thursday that this undercover Western press center was maintained by the rebels in tight secrecy. The building was practically gutted by a direct hit, suggesting that Syrian forces located it with the help of advanced electronic measures.
Another Western source noted that the journalists covering the atrocities in Homs from this hideout used coded channels of communications protected by anti-jamming and anti-tracking devices. The Syrians must therefore have called on Russian satellites or advanced Iranian electronic systems to locate it.
The authorities in Damascus decided to treat the press hideout as the first step in overt Western intervention in the Syrian conflict. It was accordingly razed totally with its occupants.
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8)Rising Gas Prices: All Part of Obama’s Plan?
Politico is shedding some light on a three year-old sound bite that continues to haunt the Obama Administration: Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s comments that American gas prices should be as high as Europe’s:
“Somehow,” Chu said, “we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”
Unsurprisingly, Republicans have latched on to these comments as evidence that the Obama Administration is out of touch with regular Americans and harbors an agenda favoring green special interests over the needs of American businesses. With gas prices rising to the point where they threaten the already-fragile economic recovery, this figures to be a potent weapon against the president in the upcoming election.
While this position may be slightly unfair to the President (Mr. Chu was not yet in the Administration at the time he made the remarks, so any link between it and administration policy is tenuous), the quote devastatingly reveals just how tone-deaf and myopic white-collar, progressive intellectualism can be. The delusion that jacking up energy prices is part of a “good government” agenda is one of the pieces of insanity that keeps the blue intelligentsia from consolidating its position as a natural governing class.
More surprising here is that Politico is jumping on the bandwagon—although it notes that Chu’s remarks have been detrimental to Obama, the piece laments that the goal of raising gas prices doesn’t get the sympathetic attention it obviously deserves, given the support of numerous “experts.” With thinking like this dominating media and intellectual circles, it’s little wonder that the mainstream media is perceived as elitist and out of touch.
What most Americans mean by energy policy is this: government policies that aim to make energy as abundant and cheap as possible, given some very basic environmental concerns (no oil on the beach). No other approach can get you elected.
For Politico, the reason more politicians don’t discuss these ideas more favorably is that they have something called a ‘survival instinct’. Politicians who boast about their successful initiatives to raise the price of gasoline don’t last. If you are a politician who wants to raise the price of gas, you have two choices in America: you can persuade the military leadership to install you in office through a coup d’etat, or you can lie to the voters and pursue your agenda on the sly.
A number of Democrats seem to have chosen the second option. The significance of the Chu sound bite is that some voters think President Obama has a stealth energy agenda, and rising gas prices tend to strengthen that perception.
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9)-Gasoline Prices Are Not Rising, the Dollar Is Falling
Panic is in the air as gasoline prices move above $4.00 per gallon. Politicians and pundits are rounding up the usual suspects, looking for someone or something to blame for this latest outrage to middle class family budgets. In a rare display of bipartisanship, President Obama and Speaker of the HouseJohn Boehner are both wringing their hands over the prospect of seeing their newly extended Social Security tax cut gobbled up by rising gasoline costs.
Unfortunately, the talking heads that are trying to explain the reasons for high oil prices are missing one tiny detail. Oil prices aren’t high right now. In fact, they are unusually low. Gasoline prices would have to rise by another $0.65 to $0.75 per gallon from where they are now just to be “normal”. And, because gasoline prices are low right now, it is very likely that they are going to go up more—perhaps a lot more.
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