With the passing of each day my recent booklet, I believe, becomes more meaningful. If children were raised as I have suggested we might have a more rational and compassionate society.
That said, the tragedy in Connecticut calls for greater rules pertaining to checking on those who wish to purchase gun.s Liberals could also outlaw insanity.
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Voters in blue states, who went solidly for President Obama’s re-election, are ironically those who will SUFFER the most from the tax-the-rich policy promoted by Obama Obama may have shot his supporters as his effort to raise taxes on those earning over $250,000 boomerangs. (See 1 below.)
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More from Mauldin's posting by Richard Maybury on The Fed's Disaster. Bottom line - own more non dollar assets. (See 2 below.)
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Lynn and I contributed to some 47 different charities this year in varying amounts and we try to give close to 10% of our income to charitable causes.
Obama is considering limiting the deductible amount one gives to $25,000. It would seem to me our society and government should encourage giving for two reasons.
1) Giving is a worthy endeavor. Americans are one of the most charitable societies in the world.
2) Public institutions benefit greatly from the charitableness of America's wealthy.
By allowing open ended charitable giving to be deductible it is true the government is sharing with the taxpayer but, at least, is not involved in directing the tax payer's giving.. Limiting deductions is simply one more individual freedom the government would be curbing.
I also understand Obama is contemplating taxing some of one's tax free income from municipal bonds Any such act on the part of the federal government simply shifts the fed's economic burden to states and is one more breach of faith by the government with its citizens.
Once again I repeat, the problem is on the spending side not the receipt side. When government takes 25% of GDP it is spending beyond its means, creating deficits which will cheapen the dollar, result in inflation and is restricting private sector growth which, in turn, leads to less employment and income for the government.
Until government ends its unbridled appetite for spending and reduces its take to 18% of GDP I am unalterably opposed to relinquishing my freedom of choice.
Bah Humbug to Obama the leechingest bloodsucking president ever elected.
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It is Darwin Awards time. (See 3 below.)
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The way of Britain is simply a forerunner to the way the West is headed. (See 4 below.)
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Will Hillary now claim, when she finally testifies about the Libyan disaster, if she does, that she cannot remember anything? (See 5 below.)
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Dick
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1)November Election Called Blue-State ‘Suicide Pact’
By Joel Kolkin
“With their enthusiastic backing of President Obama and the Democratic Party on Election Day, the bluest parts of America may have embraced a program utterly at odds with their economic self-interest,” observes Joel Kotkin, executive editor of NewGeography.com.
“The almost uniform support of blue states’ congressional representatives for the administration’s campaign for tax ‘fairness’ represents a kind of bizarre economic suicide pact.”
Raising taxes on the so-called rich — defined as households making over $250,000 a year — will have the strongest impact on blue states that depend largely on the earnings of high-income professionals including doctors and lawyers, entrepreneurs, and technical workers, he points out. The states and metropolitan areas that have the highest concentration of these people are overwhelmingly in the bluest states.
But the higher taxes will have far less effect on the truly wealthy Obama purports to target, who derive most of their income from capital gains and have access to offshore tax dodges.
The 10 states with the largest percentage of “rich” households under the Obama policy include New York, California, New Jersey, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, plus Washington, D.C. All of them are true-blue bastions, yet they would benefit the most from an extension of all the Bush-era tax cuts.
Moves to curb mortgage-interest deductions for affluent households would also fall most heavily on blue states, where home prices are highest and residents carry the largest mortgages on average, according to Kotkin, who also is a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University and author of the book “The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050.”
Singling out “rich” taxpayers could also reduce their discretionary spending, which drives employment for lower-income workers.
Kotkin’s NewGeography article — which originally appeared in Forbes magazine — also notes that being “rich” means different things in different places. A couple with two children and a $150,000 annual income in a city in red state Texas is far “richer” in terms of housing and personal consumption than a couple earning $300,000 in blue New York City or Los Angeles.
Kotkin adds: “Perhaps the greatest irony in all this is that the Republicans, largely detested in the deep-blue bastions, are the ones most likely to fall on their swords to maintain lower rates for the mass affluent class in the bluest states and metros.”
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2)The Fed-Caused Disaster Is Here, Part II
By Richard J. MayburyThe conventional view…
… of the government's monetary policy is that officials try to inflate the money supply at a rate that will keep us in a safe zone between inflationary boom and deflationary bust. (Figure E.)
If they print less money – meaning if they "tighten," as in 2004 to 2007 – we get a recession. If they print more – meaning if they "loosen," as in 2001 to 2004 – we get a double-digit inflation, meaning prices rising at more than 10% per year. (The prices do not need to be those of consumer goods, they can be of stocks, real estate, raw materials, or anything else, depending on where the money flows to. Usually, it flows into whatever firms and investments are fashionable.)
I believe the assumption that the lines between boom and bust are parallel is based on an unwillingness to face the fact of malinvestment…
The sides of the monetary policy channel are not parallel, they converge. (Figure F.) As the malinvestment grows, so does the amount of money needed to prop it up. The Fed's maneuvering room eventually disappears. Any injection big enough to avert a depression will lead to runaway inflation.
Please read that last sentence again. I think it describes where America is now, and it is the main point of this issue of Early Warning Report.
When I last wrote about this in September 2008, I suspected the disaster I had been writing about since 1992 had finally arrived. Now, I think that suspicion was right. The Fed has run out of maneuvering room. Its 96 years of creating money out of thin air – which means 96 years of creating malinvestment – have finally put us in a situation where the choice is no longer between double-digit inflation and recession, it's between triple-digit inflation and depression.
In short, I think the odds are very high that if they print enough money to keep the depression from happening, they will send the dollar into a hyperinflation like the one in 1779, when George Washington wrote, "a wagon load of money will scarcely purchase a wagon load of provisions."
The main sticking point…
… is that no one knows where all the money goes, so the malinvestment is not identifiable until the counterfeiting stops and the wave of bankruptcies begins. We cannot foresee which businesses will go under or who will lose their jobs, so the political pressure from all quarters to continue counterfeiting dollars is overwhelming.
There is no easy way out of this mess – no way to make a fresh start – without a colossal shakeout of the existing malinvestment.
Very likely, after 96 years of Fed counterfeiting, there are whole cities in the wrong locations.
It takes a lot of newly created dollars to keep this malinvestment alive. The money supply when the Fed began operations in 1914 was $11.6 billion. Today, it is $1,695.9 billion – a 145-fold increase.
When the Fed's counterfeiting stops, the flow of new dollars to these assets will, too. The cones will dry up, and prices of the assets in the cones will plunge to their real values.
The only way to delay this disaster is to continue the counterfeiting, which is what the Fed is doing.
In other words, the Fed is the Hurricane Katrina of the economy. These arrogant, socialist Fed power junkies have locked us into a runaway inflation. In the past 18 months alone, they've increased the money supply 24%. And, the monetary base, which is the raw material from which the money supply is made, has been increased 129%. Much of the base is still in the banking system, but I think it will pour out into the general economy this year.
For investors, buying non-dollar assets is paramount. However…
… stay cautious.
In 1979, Fed chief Paul Volcker took office as the dollar was headed down the tubes. Volcker decided to save the greenback by tightening monetary policy severely. This drove interest rates beyond 15%. Non-dollar assets crashed, and most were moribund for two decades.
I think there is a 30% chance of the Volcker episode being repeated, so don't bet the farm on non-dollar assets. The strategy that makes the most sense to me is the Permanent Portfolio and Variable Portfolio plan explained in Harry Browne's Fail Safe Investing. The little book only takes about 45 minutes to read.
Harry's main point is the same as mine – diversify, diversify, diversify – and he shows you the investment mix that is as close to bulletproof as anything I've ever seen, while allowing room for speculation in non-dollar assets if you so desire.
Note this: When Volcker began tightening to save the dollar in 1979, the unemployment rate was 6%, and it topped out at 10.8%. If Fed officials tighten now to save the dollar, they'll be starting with joblessness at 10%. This means, in my opinion, if they tighten they will be flirting with massive social upheaval, and they know it, so they are sacrificing the dollar to buy as much time as they can, hoping they will be out of office before the catastrophe arrives.
In short, over the past 96 years, Fed officials have created so much malinvestment that their only choice now is between big riots today and even bigger ones tomorrow. The fact that they are continuing their loose dollar policy to keep the malinvestment alive as long as possible means they have chosen the bigger riots tomorrow. My guess is, somewhere between six months and three years.
Summary
If you did not receive your share of the Fed's freshly created dollars last year, then that's your proof the Fed's newly minted greenbacks are not distributed uniformly. Some parts of the economy receive more than others, and these areas become hot spots, or cones.
My main point about all this is that the government and mainstream press do not want to acknowledge that inflating the money supply causes malinvestment. That's the key to understanding the whole mess, malinvestment – the cones. In its 96 years of behaving like a counterfeiter, the Federal Reserve has undoubtedly misled tens of thousands of businesses, large and small, into locating in the wrong places, doing the wrong things, at the wrong prices. This malinvestment must be shaken out before we can make a fresh, noninflationary start.
Keeping it all alive requires mountainous injections of newly created money, which is nearly certain to destroy the value of the dollar.
I think much of the rest of the world has figured this out, which is why they have been scolding U.S. officials, and openly searching for ways to escape from the dollar, including buying non-dollar assets such as gold, silver, platinum, oil, and other tangible assets. (See my video "How to buy precious metals" on our home pagewww.richardmaybury.com. Click on Broadcasts.)
This is why I have recently raised my estimate of the global velocity of the dollar. Many foreigners are clearly trading away their dollars as quickly as they can. But, as usual, Americans remain oblivious. Most Americans graduate from high school or college knowing nothing about currencies.
Again, if no one from the Fed handed you your share of the fresh greenbacks last year, then you know the newly created dollars are not distributed uniformly. And knowing this, you can reason out the implications, which are profound. They are why, for us ordinary mortals who don't work for the Federal Reserve, counterfeiting is illegal.
I hope you own a lot of non-dollar assets.
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3)2012 Darwin Awards – Gotta love this year's winner!!!
4) Alien nation: The new census reveals a Britain that would be unrecognisable even to our grandparents
Nominee No. 1: [San Jose Mercury News]:
An unidentified man, using a shotgun like a club to break a former girl friend's windshield, accidentally shot himself to death when the gun discharged, blowing a hole in his head.
Nominee No. 2: [Kalamazoo Gazette]:
James Burns, 34, (a mechanic) of Alamo, MI, was killed in March as he was trying to repair what police describe as a "farm-type truck." Burns got a friend to drive the truck on a highway while Burns hung underneath so that he could ascertain the source of a troubling noise. Burns' clothes caught on something, however, and the other man found Burns "wrapped in the drive shaft."
Nominee No. 3: [Hickory Daily Record]:
Ken Charles Barger, 47, accidentally shot himself to death in December in Newton, NC. Awakening to the sound of a ringing telephone beside his bed, he reached for the phone but grabbed instead a Smith & Wesson 38 Special, which discharged when he drew it to his ear.
Nominee No. 4: [UPI, Toronto ]:
Police said a lawyer demonstrating the safety of windows in a downtown Toronto skyscraper crashed through a pane with his shoulder and plunged 24 floors to his death.? A police spokesman said Garry Hoy, 39, fell into the courtyard of the Toronto Dominion Bank Tower early Friday evening as he was explaining the strength of the buildings windows to visiting law students. Hoy previously has conducted demonstrations of window strength according to police reports. Peter Lawson, managing partner of the firm Holden Day Wilson, told the Toronto Sun newspaper that Hoy was "one of the best and brightest" members of the 200-man association. A person has to wonder what the dimmer members of this law firm are like.
Nominee No. 5: [The News of the Weird]:
Michael Anderson Godwin made News of the Weird posthumously. He had spent several years awaiting South Carolina 's electric chair on a murder conviction before having his sentence reduced to life in prison. While sitting on a metal toilet in his cell attempting to fix his small TV set, he bit into a wire and was electrocuted.
Nominee No. 6: [The Indianapolis Star]:
A cigarette lighter may have triggered a fatal explosion in Dunkirk, IN. A Jay County man, using a cigarette lighter to check the barrel of a muzzleloader, was killed Monday night when the weapon discharged in his face, sheriff's investigators said. Gregory David Pryor, 19, died in his parents' rural Dunkirk home at about 11:30 PM. Investigators said Pryor was cleaning a 54-caliber muzzle-loader that had not been firing properly. He was using the lighter to look into the barrel when the gunpowder ignited.
Nominee No. 7: [Reuters, Mississauga, Ontario ]:
A man cleaning a bird feeder on the balcony of his condominium apartment in this Toronto suburb slipped and fell 23 stories to his death. "Stefan Macho, 55, was standing on a wheelchair when the accident occurred," said Inspector Darcy Homer of the Peel Regional Police. "It appears that the chair moved, and he went over the balcony," Homer said.
Finally, THE WINNER!!!: [Arkansas Democrat Gazette]:
Two local black men were injured when their pickup truck left the road and struck a tree near Cotton Plant on State Highway 38 early Monday. Woodruff County deputy Dovey Snyder reported the accident shortly after midnight Monday. Thurston Poole, 33, of Des Arc, and Billy Ray Wallis, 38, of Little Rock , were returning to Des Arc after a frog-catching trip. On an overcast Sunday night, Poole 's pickup truck headlights malfunctioned.
The two men concluded that the headlight fuse on the older-model truck had burned out. As a replacement fuse was not available, Wallis noticed that the .22 caliber bullets from his pistol fit perfectly into the fuse box next to the steering-wheel column. Upon inserting the bullet the headlights again began to operate properly, and the two men proceeded on eastbound toward the White River Bridge ..
After traveling approximately 20 miles, and just before crossing the river, the bullet apparently overheated, discharged and struck Poole in the testicles. The vehicle swerved sharply right, exited the pavement, and struck a tree. Poole suffered only minor cuts and abrasions from the accident but will require extensive surgery to repair the damage to his testicles, which will never operate as intended.
Wallis sustained a broken clavicle and was treated and released. "Thank God we weren't on that bridge when Thurston shot his balls off or we might be dead," stated Wallis
"I've been a trooper for 10 years in this part of the world, but this is a first for me. I can't believe that those two would admit how this accident happened," said Snyder.
Upon being notified of the wreck, Lavonia (Poole 's wife) asked how many frogs the boys had caught and did anyone get them from the truck? Though Poole and Wallis did not die as a result of their misadventure as normally required by Darwin Award Official Rules, it can be argued that Poole did in fact effectively remove himself from the gene pool.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Peter Hitchens says that the Census is not just a description of the state of things on a day in 2011 but a prophetic document telling us where we are going
- Christianity is on the decline while Islam is on the up and fewer of us are married for the first time ever
Unrecognisable: Peter Hitchens argues that a real and irreversible transformation has only just begun
The future will be another country. They will do things differently there.
The Census is not just a description of the state of things on a day in 2011, it is a prophetic document telling us where we are going, whether we like it or not. I don’t.
For the past 60 years or so, we have lived in a nation that was more or less familiar to anyone who had grown up in the pre-war Britain of 1939.
Even the devastation of conflict had not transformed it out of recognition.
People behaved, thought, worked, laughed and enjoyed themselves much as they had done for decades.
They lived in the same sorts of families in the same kind of houses. Their children went to the same kinds of schools.
And they had grown up in a land that was still identifiably the same as their grandparents had known.
And so it went back for centuries.
As recently as 1949, the prices of most goods were roughly the same, and expressed in the same money, as the prices of 1649.
A short-distance time-traveller between 1912 and 2012 might be perplexed and astonished, but he would not be lost.
That period is now coming to an end. I suspect that anyone in Britain, travelling between 2012 and 2112 would be unable to believe that he was in the same place.
What is the most significant single fact in the Census? I do not think there is one. Several are shocking or disturbing, if you are not fond of change, and delightful if you are.
But there are some, which taken together, prophesy a transformation to come.
Look at these – manufacturing is now only the fourth-biggest employer, after supplying and selling goods and services, health and social work and education.
So, in the nation that was once the ‘Workshop of the World’, we now have more teachers than industrial workers.
Alien nation: The latest census results reveal a nation almost unrecognisable to even our grandparents
Rise and fall: The Christian population is in decline while the number of Muslim residents is on the rise
London is rapidly becoming a separate nation, as different from England as Scotland or Wales are, with indigenous British people now in a minority, in some areas a very small minority indeed, and incidentally with extremes of wealth and poverty not known since Edwardian times.
Then of course there is the decline in Christianity, down by four million, from 72 per cent to 59 per cent; the growth in indifference to religion, with non-believers almost doubling to 14.1 million; and also of Islam, rising so fast that one British resident in 20 is now a Muslim.
The Muslim population is young, and keen on large families, while the Christian population tends to be older and less likely to have children.
This is very much a work in progress, far from complete. A lot of nominal Christians are no longer bothering to pretend to a faith they have never cared much about.
Do not be surprised if, in ten years, the gap between the number of professing Christians and the number of Muslims has grown much smaller.
The secularists, who have so enthusiastically sought to drive Christianity out of British life, may realise with a gulp of apprehension that they have only created a vacancy for Islam – a faith that is not at all troubled by Richard Dawkins.
Perhaps most significant of all is the accelerating disappearance of marriage as the normal state of life for grown-up people.
For the first time, fewer than half of adults are married.
Getting hitched: Homosexuals seem to be most enthusiastic about marriage just as heterosexuals tire of it
This means many things – a greater number of fatherless households, a greater number of cohabiting couples, the rapid disappearance of what was once a strong social force.
Since the stable married family is a fortress of private life and individuality, its retreat will mean the opposite of that: more state interference and surveillance, more conformism – and more conformists – and mass culture. Its main effect will be on the children.
Many of them will grow up outside what used to be normal, a lifelong two-parent home.
They will, as a result, be different sorts of people. Already, almost half of Britain’s 15-year-olds do not live with their ‘birth parents’; 300,000 sets of parents split each year.
I cannot believe this is not part of the reason for the so-called ‘riots’ of 2011, in which young men brought up without male authority ran wild.
These were equal-opportunity events, and their causes were home-grown, not imported. This will get much, much worse.
Again, conservatives will find this worrying and ill-omened. Liberal ‘progressives’, who have never had much time for the married family, seeing it as a sort of prison, will view it as a liberation.
Edmund Leach, giving his influential Reith Lectures in 1967, put it this way: ‘Far from being the basis of the good society, the family, with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets, is the source of all our discontents.’
It is striking that just as homosexuals seem to be most enthusiastic about getting married, heterosexuals are tiring of the whole thing.
But now compare the giant political fuss over same-sex marriage with the numbers of people affected. See just what a tiny proportion of the country is involved.
While the decline of conventional marriage involves many millions, there are 105,000 people in civil partnerships, one-fifth of one per cent of the population, one person in 500.
And that is seven years after they first became available.
Foreign influx: Immigration still stands at 180,000 a year
I have deliberately left migration to the end. The figures are astonishing, with one in ten people in England and Wales now born abroad, and the rate of increase over the past few years equally astounding – almost half of these new citizens have arrived here since 2001.
And, in a figure that has not attracted the attention it should have, almost three million people live in households where no adults speak English as their first language.
The main significance of this is the speed of it. Even now, official immigration still stands at 180,000 a year. Probably these totals are an underestimate, as illegal migrants tend not to fill in forms.
But the really important fact is that this revolution is the result of a deliberate, planned attempt to change this country for ever, and
we have the evidence of this.
On October 23, 2009, a former New Labour official called Andrew Neather wrote an article in the London Evening Standard which was that very rare thing – a genuine revelation of a political secret.
The crucial passage described ‘a major shift from the policy of previous governments’.
Canvassing: On Friday the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, was still trying to appeal to working-class voters whose views his metropolitan fat-cat party secretly despises.
It disclosed that a ‘big immigration report was surrounded by an unusual air of both anticipation and secrecy . . . there was a paranoia about it reaching the media . . . Earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.
‘I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended – even if this wasn’t its main purpose – to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date. That seemed to me to be a manoeuvre too far.
‘Ministers were very nervous about the whole thing . . . There was a reluctance elsewhere in Government to discuss what increased immigration would mean, above all for Labour’s core white working-class vote . . .
‘Part by accident, part by design, the Government had created its longed-for immigration boom. But Ministers wouldn’t talk about it.’ Why not? Because Labour voters wouldn’t have liked it.
‘While Ministers might have been passionately in favour of a more diverse society, it wasn’t necessarily a debate they wanted to have in working-men’s clubs in Sheffield or Sunderland.’
On Friday the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, was still trying to appeal to working-class voters whose views his metropolitan fat-cat party secretly despises.
While praising immigration to his London audience, he pretended to be concerned about it by admitting there is ‘anxiety’ about the pace of change.
He promised (absurdly, since the EU has controlled our frontiers for many years) that ‘Britain must always control its borders’.
But he then swiftly dismissed the idea – which would be the only hope of future harmony – that migrants should assimilate, saying this was ‘wrong for our country’.
He proclaimed: ‘One Nation doesn’t mean one identity. People can be proudly, patriotically British without abandoning their cultural roots.’
Is this true? In the days when the USA still sought to assimilate its migrants, it certainly didn’t think so. It insisted that they became Americans in every way, and as soon as they could.
Half the point of American state schools was the creation of new young Americans.
Since that policy was abandoned 30 years ago, the USA has in reality ceased to be one country, with large areas speaking Spanish and retaining the customs and cultures of their homes, hostile or chilly to their American fellow citizens, who return the favour.
Any observant person in Britain can see the same process in such cities as Bradford, where multiculturalism has created two solitudes with their backs turned on each other.
Bit by bit, the people of this country are ceasing to have key things in common. They don’t share a religion, or a culture, or a history. Many don’t even share a language.
They don’t eat the same food or watch the same TV stations or have a common sense of humour.
They sometimes even disagree about whether to drive on the left.
Class difference: There's a widening gap between rich and poor with the rich having servants for the first time since the era of Downton
They come from completely different legal and political traditions.
In a strange paradox, many of the new Britons are more socially and morally conservative than their indigenous British neighbours, though their presence here is a sort of revolution in flesh and blood.
Many of the new migrants also have a completely different work ethic, not having grown up in our entitlement-based welfare state – which is why one of their main unspoken functions in Labour’s plan has been to keep wages down by providing a huge pool of cheap and willing unskilled labour.
Without mass immigration, the minimum wage would long ago have had to rise sharply, creating the crisis that all economists predicted when it was introduced.
As it is, we are fast becoming a low-wage, unskilled economy, with overcrowded cities, multi-occupied housing and hopelessly strained medical services, transport and schools.
There is also a widening gap between the rich, who can afford servants again for the first time since the era of Downton Abbey, and the poor, who have to be those servants.
The only way we will be able to sustain this is by becoming steadily cheaper, devaluing our currency through inflation and incidentally destroying the savings and pensions of the thrifty.
That will also kill off the welfare state, whose provisions and payouts will gradually shrink to the point where they are valueless.
We are also becoming a more violent, noisy and unrestrained culture, more drunk, more drugged, more indebted, more rootless and less particular.
Our language is increasingly internationalised and full of Americanisms (Mr Miliband thinks railway stations are called ‘train stations’), our landmarks, particularly the customary weights and measures with which millions grew up, are being extirpated in schools and on the media.
There is no sign that any of these developments are stopping, or even slowing. Far from it. They are accelerating. They were meant to.
The secret thinkers at the core of the Blair Government wanted to begin the world over again, at home and abroad, though they never dared to tell us how.
As their mighty, unstoppable project unfolds, Britain as we knew it will disappear, as they hoped it would. At least we know who to blame.
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5)Hillary Clinton gets concussion after fainting
By
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton sustained a concussion after fainting from dehydration at her home early last week, her office disclosed Saturday.
Clinton, 65, has been suffering from a stomach virus and had to cancel a trip to Morocco and the Persian Gulf on Monday.
Philippe Reines, a State Department spokesman, said Clinton became dehydrated because of the virus and fainted, sustaining the concussion. He said she has been under the care of doctors.
“At their recommendation, she will continue to work from home next week, staying in regular contact with department and other officials,” Reines said in a statement. “She is looking forward to being back in the office soon.”
Because of her illness, she will not testify at congressional hearings on Thursday about the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, according to a statement from the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
In her place, Deputy Secretary of State William Burns and Deputy Secretary of State for Management Thomas Nides are scheduled to appear before the House committee and likely its Senate counterpart, the Foreign Relations Committee.
The Obama administration faces lingering questions about the episode, in which U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed, including whether Stevens had sufficient security and what U.S. officials knew before they blamed the attack on a protest over an anti-Islam video. Later intelligence showed that there was no protest and that the heavily armed attackers were linked to extremist militias.
The Accountability Review Board appointed by the State Department is expected to complete its report on the Benghazi attacks this week. The board’s two leaders, Ambassador Thomas Pickering and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen are scheduled to provide a closed-door, classified briefing for the two congressional committees on Wednesday.
Clinton, who has traveled to more countries than any previous secretary of state, developed a virus after returning from a trip to Europe. Several members of her staff also were ill.
Clinton has said that she will leave the job after the Senate confirms a successor. One of the leading candidates, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, withdrew from consideration on Thursday, saying Republican opposition to her because of statements she made on television talk shows five days after the Benghazi attack would have distracted the president from other objectives.
Obama is expected to nominate Sen. John F. Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat and former presidential candidate, early this
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