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The economic news was mixed and seasonally and specifically influenced. This economist believes it is worse than the Administration will allow.
Time will tell. Always does. (See 2 below.)
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Timbuktu only romantic in the movies. Sharia law made life dismal. (See 3 below.)
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Hagel flops!
Schumer looks like the fool he is because the White House pressured him before Hagel testified. No doubt Hagel will be approved because Democrats will rally round the president and not the nation.(See 4 below.)
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Super Bowl lhumor. (See 5 below.)
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Dick
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Last Wishes
A woman in Brooklyn decided to prepare her will and
make her final requests. She told her rabbi she had two final
requests.
First, she wanted to be cremated, and second, she wanted her ashes scattered all over the shopping mall.
"Why the shopping mall?" asked the rabbi. "Then I'll be sure my daughters visit me twice a
week."
No Pressure!
A man is laying on the operating table, about to be operated on by his son, the surgeon..
The father says, "Son, think of it this way...
If anything happens to me, your mother is coming to live
with you."
PHILANTHROPY
A visitor to Israel attended a recital and concert at the Moscovitz Auditorium. He was quite impressed with the architecture and the acoustics. He inquired of the tour guide, "Is this magnificent auditorium named after Chaim
Moscovitz, the famous Talmudic scholar?"
"No," replied the guide. "It is named after Sam Moscovitz, the writer."
"Never heard of him. What did he write?"
"A check", replied the guide.
2)Wiedemer to Moneynews: Economy Could Be 'Significantly Worse' Than US Says
While many economists say the 0.1 percent decline in the fourth-quarter gross domestic product (GDP) isn’t as bad as it looks, financial commentator Robert Wiedemer, best-selling author of "Aftershock," says the number is actually worse than it looks.
That’s because the government only adjusts GDP numbers by an annual inflation rate of 0.6 percent, even though the Consumer Price Index rose 1.7 percent last year, he tells Newsmax TV in an exclusive interview. And given the slim magnitude of GDP change, the inflation number makes a big difference.
“I think this number could actually be significantly worse than what the government is saying,” Wiedemer notes. While government spending, particularly defense, was blamed for much of the slip, Wiedemer says it’s really just the vagaries of how the government measures its spending.
Unadjusted numbers show that the government actually spent more in the fourth quarter than in the third quarter — $907 billion versus $877 billion, he says.
“Because of the way they sometimes measure government spending, it doesn’t always show up in GDP,” Wiedemer adds. “But it wasn’t that government spending went down. I think we all know that.”
This doesn’t mean GDP won’t grow in the first quarter, he maintains. It’s just that “the reality here is that the economy is much slower than many people, certainly the government, want you to believe — and even some members of the financial community want you to believe.”
Virtually all the world has joined the United States in its slow-growth mode, including most of Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia and Brazil.
“This [the U.S. slowdown] isn’t really an aberration from how the world economy looks, and I don’t think it’s all of a sudden just going to miraculously pick up in the next year,” added Wiedemer, a managing director of Absolute Investment Management, an investment-advisory firm for individuals with more than $300 million under management.
“Next quarter, maybe it picks up a little. … But I think it clearly indicates we’re part of the slowing world economy.”
Some might argue that the stock market is a leading indicator so that its sharp rise over the past year signals strength ahead for the economy. But Wiedemer disagrees.
“How much of a leading indicator really was the market in 2008? I’m not sure it really led that well.” The market hit record highs in October 2007, about a year before the financial system nearly collapsed.
On a smaller scale, Apple stock’s explosive gains last year until September gave little warning of the company’s earnings slowdown that lay ahead, says Wiedemer, a regular contributor to Financial Intelligence Report, the flagship investment newsletter of Newsmax Media.
“I don’t know how much of a leading indicator the stock market is. In some ways it’s more of a cheerleader at times than a leading indicator.”
At this point the economy may be more of a leading indicator for the stock market than the other way around, Wiedemer says. “I think fundamentally what you’ve got is a slowing economy. … Obviously it’s going to make the market a little bit more worried.”
About Robert Wiedemer
Robert Wiedemer is a managing director of Absolute Investment Management, an investment-advisory firm for individuals with more than $300 million under management. He is a regular contributor to the Financial Intelligence Report, the flagship investment newsletter of Newsmax Media. Click Here to read more of his articles. Discover more about his book, "Aftershock," by Clicking Here Now.
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3)Timbuktu Endured Terror Under Harsh Shariah Law
When the Islamist militants came to town, Dr. Ibrahim Maiga made a reluctant deal. He would do whatever they asked — treat their wounded, heal their fevers, bandage up without complaint the women they thrashed in the street for failing to cover their heads and faces. In return, they would allow him to keep the hospital running as he wished.
Then, one day in October, the militants called him with some unusual instructions. Put together a team, they said, bring an ambulance and come to a sun-baked public square by sand dunes.
There, before a stunned crowd, the Islamist fighters carried out what they claimed was the only just sentence for theft: cutting off the thief’s hand. As one of the fighters hacked away at the wrist of a terrified, screaming young man strapped to a chair, Dr. Maiga, a veteran of grisly emergency room scenes, looked away.
“I was shocked,” he said, holding his head in his hands. “But I was powerless. My job is to heal people. What could I do?”
After nearly 10 months of occupation by Islamists fighters, many of them linked with Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the people of this ancient mud-walled city recounted how they survived the upending of their tranquil lives in a place so remote that its name has become a synonym for the middle of nowhere.
“Our lives were turned upside down,” Dr. Maiga said. “They had guns, so whatever they asked, we did. It was useless to resist.”
It has been only a few days since French and Malian troops marched into Timbuktu after heavy airstrikes chased the militants away, part of a surprisingly rapid campaign to retake northern Mali from the militants who held it captive for months. On Thursday, France’s defense minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, told French radio that the intervention had “succeeded” and reached “a point of change.”
But while the Islamist militants have retreated to the desert, there are no illusions that they have ceased to be a threat. As American officials praised the speed of the French-led operation to recapture northern cities, they also cautioned that a lengthy campaign would be needed to root out the militants from their desert redoubts — and that it was not immediately clear who would carry out the daunting task.
“This is all being done very much on the fly,” one American official said of the intervention. “The challenge will be to keep up the pressure when the sense is to declare victory and go home.”
Here in Timbuktu, life is certainly a long way from returning to normal. Shops owned by Arab tradesmen have been looted. Some residents have fled, a foretaste of ethnic strife that many fear will roil Mali for years to come. Electricity and running water are available only a few hours a day. The cellphone network remains down.
Many of the residents who left — first to escape the occupation, then to escape the French airstrikes — have no way to return. Always remote, the city remains dangerously isolated: the dusty tracks and rivers leading here wind through forbidding scrubland territory that could still provide refuge for the Islamist fighters who melted away from the cities.
Those who remained told stories of how they survived the long occupation: by hiding away treasured manuscripts and amulets forbidden by the Islamists, burying crates of beer in the desert, standing by as the tombs of saints they venerated were reduced to rubble, silencing their radios to the city’s famous but now forbidden music.
“They tried to take away everything that made Timbuktu Timbuktu,” said Mahalmoudou Tandina, a marabout, or Islamic preacher, whose ancestors first settled in Timbuktu from Morocco in the 13th century. “They almost succeeded.”
The occupation of Timbuktu, a center of learning for centuries, was the latest in a long historical list of conquests — by Arab nations, by the Songhai and Maasina empires, by France. Once again, powerful global forces were in play in this fabled city: a network of Islamic extremists, the armies of France and West Africa, and to a lesser extent the United States, which has flown in French forces and refueled French warplanes during the campaign.
Through it all, the city’s residents, whose ancestors endured such ravages for the better part of a millennium, have adapted as best they could.
On April 1, the day rebels arrived in this city, Mr. Tandina had just returned from the first, predawn prayer of the day. He made bittersweet tea to the murmur of a French radio broadcast. The news was bad: Gao, the largest city in northern Mali, had fallen to Tuareg rebels, the nomadic fighters who had been battling the Malian state for decades.
His hometown was almost certainly their next target. When shots rang out in Independence Square, just behind Mr. Tandina’s house, he knew that Timbuktu’s latest conquerors had arrived.
“The barbarians were at our gate,” he said with a sigh. “And not for the first time.”
The Tuareg fighters took control of the city, and for two days they looted its sprawling markets, raped women, stole cars and killed anyone who stood in their way.
“Then the man with the big beard came,” Mr. Tandina said.
Barrel-chested and dressed in a blue tunic, the leader of Ansar Dine, an Islamist group with links to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, arrived with several truckloads of fighters. The new rebels called the city’s people to a public square and made an announcement.
“They said, ‘We are Muslims. We came here to imposeShariah,’ ” Mr. Tandina said.
At first, Timbuktu’s people were relieved, he said. Beginning a hearts-and-minds campaign, the group garrisoned the fearsome Tuareg nationalists outside of town, which stopped the raping and pillaging.
They did not charge for electricity or collect taxes. Commerce went on more or less as usual, he said.
Then a mysterious group of visitors came from Gao, heavily armed men riding in pickup trucks, trailing desert dust.
“They told us they were here to establish an Islamic republic,” Mr. Tandina said.
It started with the women. If they showed their faces in the market they would be whipped. The local men grew angry at attacks on their wives, so they organized a march to the headquarters of the Islamic police, who had installed themselves in a bank branch.
The Islamists greeted the protesters by shooting in the air. Many fled, but a small group, including Mr. Tandina, insisted that they be heard.
A young, bearded man came out to meet them. Much to Mr. Tandina’s surprise, he recognized the Islamic police official. His name was Hassan Ag, and before the fighting began he had been a lab technician at the local hospital.
“When I knew him he was cleanshaven, and he wore ordinary clothes of a bureaucrat,” Mr. Tandina said.
Now he was dressed in the uniform of the Islamist rebellion: a tunic, loose trousers cut well above the ankle, in imitation of the Prophet Muhammad, and a machine gun slung across his shoulder.
“I told him our women were being harmed,” he said.
Mr. Ag was unmoved.
“This is Islamic law,” he said, according to Mr. Tandina. “There is nothing I can do. And the worst is yet to come.”
Soon it came. They began destroying tombs of the saints venerated by Timbuktu’s Muslims. Armed with pickaxes and sledgehammers, they reduced to rubble the tomb of Sidi Mahmoud, a saint who, according to legend, protected the city from invaders.
Venerating saints, an ancient practice here, was considered un-Islamic in the austere version of the faith proclaimed by the occupiers.
Mr. Tandina said he tried to use his decades of Koranic education to argue with the Islamists, citing verses about respecting the burial places. They would not listen.
Before long, he said, amputations started. Then came the executions. Again he said he tried to intervene, going to the Islamic court with stacks of Islamic law books under his arm.
“Islam was whatever they said it was,” he said. “They did not respect the holy book. They respected nothing but their own desires.”
For hundreds of years, Timbuktu was one of the world’s most important centers of Islamic learning. The city has dozens of mosques, and it is famous for the ancient, handwritten manuscripts that city residents have collected for generations, preserving them against waves of invaders and creating a priceless trove of knowledge about the Islamic world and beyond. Many families have long traditions of Islamic learning, passed from father to son.
So many here bristled when the Islamists called the population to lecture them about the proper practice of the religion in which they had been raised.
“What they call Islam is not what we know is Islam,” said Dramane Cissé, the 78-year-old imam at one of the city’s biggest and oldest mosques. “They are arrogant bullies who use religion as a veil for their true desires.”
But like many Muslims here, he hid away his amulets, prayer beads and other banned religious items. In his mind his faith remained the same.
“I was born in my religion and I will die in my religion,” Mr. Cissé said. “I know what I believe and nothing can change that.”
The compromises Dr. Maiga made to keep his hospital going continue to haunt him.
After the young man’s hand was cut off, the Islamists held it aloft and shouted “God is great” over and over, he said.
Dr. Maiga and his team hustled the young man into the ambulance and rushed him into the operating room to cauterize the wound, giving him powerful painkillers.
“I did what I had to do,” he said. “God help us.”
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4)HAGEL GETS HIS CLOCK CLEANED
Former Nebraska Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel walked into the Dirksen Senate Office Building with a smile on his face at 9 a.m. on the morning of his hearing for confirmation to the post of secretary of defense.
Once he was seated, though, Republican panelists on the Senate Armed Services Committee took turns wringing out the apparent inconsistencies in his rhetoric over the years.
Since President Barack Obama nominated Hagel for the post, the former Republican Party senator from Nebraska has come under sustained scrutiny for controversial statements that run the gamut of U.S. defense and national security issues.
The meat of this scrutiny has come from his former colleagues in the Republican Party who have expressed alarm at his statements on Iran as a terrorist state, the interest groups that drive congressional policy toward Israel, global nuclear disarmament, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Though Hagel dutifully answered many of his colleagues’ questions on these issues, some of them he attempted to side step, only to find himself up against a persistent challenge. The freshman tea party senator from Texas, Ted Cruz, had a television rolled out to play an interview Hagel did with the news agency Al Jazeera in 2009.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), for another, pressed Hagel on his prior statements in opposition to the Iraq War troop surge in 2007, asking if he had been right or wrong in calling it the most dangerous foreign policy blunder since Vietnam.
“That’s a direct question. I expect a direct answer,” McCain said, cutting Hagel off when he began to explain the characterization.
“I’m not going to give you a yes or no answer,” Hagel said.
When pressed again on whether the surge was the most dangerous blunder since Vietnam, he said, “As I’ve said, I’ll defer that judgment to history.”
“Then let the record show you refused to answer the question,” McCain said. “I think history has already made a judgment about the surge, sir, and you’re on the wrong side of it.”
He warned that Hagel’s refusal to answer the question would affect the Arizona senator’s vote on the nomination to head of the Pentagon.
Sen. Saxby Chambliss, Jr. (R-Ga.) addressed the SecDef pick’s views on a so-called red line demarcating a point past which the United States would take military action against Iran, whose continued nuclear program and aggressive rhetoric toward Israel has piqued alarm among observers.
“We know there’s some things happening over there that are very serious, so how far do we go?” Chambliss asked.
Hagel responded, “Well, I think the president has gone as far as he should go publicly on that.”
Obama has said repeatedly that all options are on the table in preventing a nuclear-armed Iran, including military action, but has not specified how far the rogue state’s progress will go before such action would take place.
What constitutes when further action should be taken is always something that should not be discussed publicly, he said.
One of Hagel’s other most harshly criticized comments was a statement he made that a so-calledJewish lobby has inappropriate sway over policy decisions in Congress.
Republican Sens. Roger Wicker (Miss.) and Lindsey Graham (S.C.) both needled Hagel on this, who walked back his language each time. Graham was not as easily satisfied as Wicker on the matter, interrupting him at one point to demand, “Name one dumb thing we’ve been goaded into doing because of the Israeli or Jewish lobby.”
“I don’t know,” Hagel said.
Graham asked if Hagel agreed with him that it was a provocative thing to have said. Hagel said he agreed.
When pressed about whether he might reconsider labeling the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization, a move which Hagel voted against while a senator, he eventually caved, saying he would. Graham relented on the issue and left the chamber.
Sens. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) and Debra Fischer (R-Neb.) asked how a report by nuclear disarmament advocacy group Global Zero’s description of unilateral disarmament was consistent with his testimony at the hearing that he supported only negotiated, multilateral moves. Hagel was a co-author of the report, which the Heritage Foundation has called radical.
In response, Hagel repeatedly called the report an illustration of possible scenarios rather than recommendations for actions the U.S. ought to take with its nuclear arsenal. The hang-up on the language—as the differences between illustration versus recommendation and should versuscould—extended the exchange, which was hardly resolved by its end.
In a series of policy questions answered in writing in advance of the hearing, Hagel balanced his allegiance to the president’s positions with the real challenges of maintaining the strongest military in the world in an age of austerity.
“If confirmed, I would continue to urge the Congress to pass a full-year appropriations bill for the Department of Defense and for other federal agencies so that the Department and other federal agencies may be run efficiently, with the ability to adapt to changing circumstances, as the taxpayers expect and deserve,” he wrote.
When Sen. Kirsten Gilligrand (D-N.Y.) asked about his view on the war in Afghanistan, Hagel testified once again that he supported Obama’s position. In this case that means a troop drawdown and limiting a residual force’s objectives to counterterrorism operations and continuing to train the Afghan police and military forces.
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5) The Afghan Quarterback
The coach had put together the perfect team for the Chicago
Bears. The only thing that was missing was a good quarterback. He had
scouted all the colleges and even the Canadian and European Leagues, but
he couldn't find a ringer who could ensure a Super Bowl win.
Then one night while watching CNN he saw a war-zone scene in
Afghanistan . In one corner of the background, he spotted a young Afghan
Muslim soldier with a truly incredible arm. He threw a hand-grenade
straight into a 15th story window 100 yards away.
KABOOM!
He threw another hand-grenade 75 yards away, right into a
chimney.
KA-BLOOEY!
Then he threw another at a passing car going 90 mph.
BULLS-EYE!
"I've got to get this guy!" Coach said to himself. "He has the
perfect arm!"
So, he brings him to the States and teaches him the great game
of football. And the Bears go on to win the Super Bowl.
The young Afghan is hailed as the great hero of football, and
when the coach asks him what he wants, all the young man wants is to
call his mother.
"Mom," he says into the phone, "I just won the Super Bowl!"
"I don't want to talk to you, the old Muslim woman says. "You
are not my son!"
"I don't think you understand, Mother," the young man pleads.
"I've won the greatest sporting event in the world. I'm here among
thousands of my adoring fans."
"No! Let me tell you!" his mother retorts. "At this very moment,
there are gunshots all around us. The neighborhood is a pile of rubble.
Your two brothers were beaten within an inch of their lives last week,
and I have to keep your sister in the house so she doesn't get
molested!" The old lady pauses, and then tearfully says,
"I will never forgive you for making us move to Chicago !!!!
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