Keep America Seething! Joey Alexander Trio and Savannah Music Festival/Rob Gibson! Maxine At Her Clearest!

Nothing offended me today.  Must be losing it.
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More chilling evidence why Obama seems he wants to help Iran gain wealth more than end American energy dependence. His rules, regulations and crippling strategy against coal are beyond logic. They are simply based upon rigid ideology and "Green" with envy pro Muslim empathy.

By killing off high paying energy jobs Obama can perpetuate the $15 minimum hourly wedge issue and create more discord and attacks on capitalism.

His goal has always been to keep Americans seething.. (See 1 below.)
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Does Maxine have a solution? (See 2 below.)
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Tonight we went to a Jazz Concert featuring a 13 year old Balinese pianist accompanied by his drummer and base player.

Joey Alexander, has to be seen and heard to believe.  You can read about him by clicking on: The Savannah Music Festival.Com

This is the 27th year and Rob Gibson has turned it into a two plus week "must" event.
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Palestinians always lose because of their pitiful, hateful and corrupt  leadership.  (See 3 below.)
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Obama's Iran continues to threaten Israel. (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1)

Kicking the Oil Business When It’s Down

Rising regulatory scrutiny of banks that lend to energy companies is tightening the screws on fossil fuels.

By PAUL H. TICE

Crude oil prices have dropped precipitously over the past 18 months, and while there has

been a recent uptick, the energy industry is struggling. Despite laying off workers, cutting

capital budgets and refinancing debt, 45 U.S. oil and gas companies have filed for 

bankruptcy since the beginning of 2015, with more expected to follow.

Despite the strategic importance of oil and gas production to the U.S. economy and even

its national security, however, the Obama administration has continued to push its climate-

change agenda, leading to new rules, regulations and restrictions on fossil fuels. The net

effect will be to raise companies’ operating costs and limit their financing options.

The Environmental Protection Agency proposed new rules in 2015 to curtail methane

 emissions from new oil and gas wells and is now readying additional restrictions on

 existing wells. Also last year, the Interior Department announced new disclosure

 requirements and operating procedures for hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) on federal

 lands. Then came the State Department’s gratuitous rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline

 in November. In his recently released fiscal 2017 federal budget, President Obama

 proposed a confiscatory $10.25 per barrel tax on oil—when West Texas Intermediate

 (WTI) crude was trading at $30 per barrel.

Most damaging is the regulatory pressure being applied through the banking system, 

which has dampened the credit available for energy companies. Oil and gas development

is capital-intensive and marked by a depleting resource base and a continuing need for

external financing, particularly when commodity prices are low. Access to credit is the

industry’s Achilles’ heel.

Bank loans backed by the value of oil and gas reserves are the cheapest type of financing

and the main source of liquidity for upstream drilling programs. The value of the loan

collateral—and the company’s line of credit—is redetermined semiannually—typically

 every October and April—to reflect real-time commodity prices and current company and

 industry fundamentals. In other words, these asset-backed loans are effectively callable

every six months, thus limiting a bank’s exposure to loan losses or defaults.

Nonetheless, since oil prices started to decline in mid-2014, the Federal Reserve, the 

Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. have all increased

their regulatory scrutiny of banks in the energy-lending business. This is allegedly due to concerns over the adequacy of banks’ capital and the potential for losses spreading

 through the financial system.

However, by any measure, the risk to the banking system from energy loans appears

manageable. In the 2015 Shared National Credit (SNC) review conducted by bank

regulators, the amount of oil and gas commitments across the federally supervised banking system totaled $276.5 billion or only 7.1% of aggregate SNC loans. For perspective, this

is much less than the $1.3 trillion of student loans currently outstanding, which have a delinquency rate of roughly 20%-25%. Apart from a handful of energy-focused regional

 banks, most U.S. banks have less than 5% of their total loan portfolios concentrated in

 energy.

Furthermore, most bank loans to oil and gas companies are made to investment-grade

companies with diversified operations and strong balance sheets. For smaller high-yield

and private energy companies, bank loans are almost always secured by a first lien,

which makes them much more likely to be repaid in the case of a default.

Despite the facts, all three federal agencies have been publicly warning banks about their

exposure to the oil and gas industry, the press coverage of which has only served to

increase the correlation between WTI futures and bank share prices. This will lead to

further cuts in financing for many cash-starved energy companies, turning a challenging

credit situation into a potential liquidity crisis. Current estimates are that banks will

reduce most energy company credit lines by roughly 20%-40% this month, compared

with an average reduction of 5%-10% last fall.

There will be losses on loans to energy companies, and banks will no doubt increase their

 loss provisions. But the effect will be mainly felt on bank earnings, not on liquidity or

 solvency, and the losses will not pose a risk of contagion to the rest of the financial 

system.

Since the 2008 financial crisis, U.S. banks have slowly been converted into the equivalent

of regulated utilities. So it is fair to ask whether the climate-change ideology of the

Obama administration is driving the current aggressive approach of bank regulators 

toward energy loans and, in turn, if this will have a chilling effect on bank lending to the 

oil and gas industry going forward.

Many large U.S. banks—including J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and

Wells Fargo—have recently announced that they will no longer finance coal mines or 

coal-fired power generation. Crude oil and natural gas production may not be far behind. ​

Mr. Tice is a senior managing director and head of the Energy Capital Group at USCA 

Asset Management LLC.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

2)This is the best analogy yet!

  Leave it to Maxine to come up with a solution for the mess that
US/Canada/UK/Germany/Australia/NZ is now in economically.
I bought a bird feeder.  I hung it
on my back porch and filled it
with seed. What a beauty of
a bird feeder it was, as I filled it
lovingly with seed.
Within a week we had hundreds of birds
taking advantage of the
continuous flow of free and
easily accessible food.

But then the birds started
building nests in the boards
of the patio, above the table,
and next to the barbecue. 

Then came the shit. It was
everywhere: on the patio tile,
the chairs, the table ...
everywhere!

Then some of the birds
turned mean. They would
dive bomb me and try to
peck me even though I had
fed them out of my own
pocket.

And others birds were
boisterous and loud. They
sat on the feeder and
squawked and screamed at
all hours of the day and night
and demanded that I fill it
when it got low on food.

After a while, I couldn't even
sit on my own back porch
anymore. So I took down the
bird feeder and in three days
the birds were gone. I cleaned
up their mess and took down
the many nests they had built
all over the patio.

Soon, the back yard was like
it used to be ..... quiet, serene....
and no one demanding their
rights to a free meal.

Now let's see......
Our government gives out
free food, subsidized housing,
free medical care and free
education, and allows anyone
born here to be an automatic
citizen.

Then the illegals came by the
tens of thousands. Suddenly
our taxes went up to pay for
free services; small apartments
are housing 5 families; you
have to wait 6 hours to be seen
by an emergency room doctor;
Your child's second grade class is
behind other schools because
over half the class doesn't speak
English.

Corn Flakes now come in a
bilingual box; I have to
'press one ' to hear my bank
talk to me in English, and
people waving flags other
than ”ours” are
squawking and screaming
in the streets, demanding
more rights and free liberties.

Just my opinion, but maybe
it's time for the government
to take down the bird feeder. 

If you agree, pass it on; if not,
just continue cleaning up the shit!


 

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

3)  The Historic Betrayal of the Palestinians
By Bassam Tawil  (A scholar based in the Middle East.)

• Why, throughout its history, have the Palestinians been the victims of so many 
• irresponsible leaders who harm their own constituents?
• Historically, the Palestinian “liberation organizations” have had no ideology or 
• motivation beyond the destruction of the State of Israel. They are proxies of the
•  countries funding them, instead of acting in the authentic national interests of the 
• Palestinian people.
• Instead of bringing jobs, water and better education — as they promise when they 
• stand for election — some Arab Israeli legislators sell out their people for a few 
• crumbs of headline attention. They parrot the Iranian line, with no regard for the 
• needs of their voters. Iran just wants to get its foot in the door.
• With the generous “help” of our Palestinian leaders — and especially with the 
• “help” of the treacherous Europeans who keep on enabling them — any real help for 
• the Palestinians looks more distant than ever.

We Palestinians, as a new people on the stage of history, have not yet learned from the 

experience of those who preceded us. We always seem to be motivated by factors working

against us, and let ourselves be manipulated by foreign countries who use us as proxies to 

further their own interests.

We are making mistakes again, one after another. We do damage to the Palestinian national 

interest and instead of propelling ourselves forward, we push ourselves back. We work against 

our own best interests by constantly lying. We all know, for instance, that there is no truth to the

 claim that Jesus was a Palestinian, or when we say that the Jews have no historic links to 

Jerusalem. We just make ourselves look ridiculous. Whoever makes such claims not only attacks Christianity but also represents the entire Palestinian narrative as a blatant lie.

The Palestinian leadership continues to destroy every chance the Palestinians might have of 

becoming a genuine, internationally recognized nation by insisting on demands they know the 

Israelis will never meet. These include the right of return for more than 11 million Palestinians 

to a country of eight million, and refusing to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. The Israelis 

correctly understand both demands not as a desire to have a Palestinian state, but as a desire to 

have Israel's state. That impression can only be confirmed every time anyone looks at a map of 

Palestine: by pure coincidence, of course, it is identical to the map of Israel, only the names are 

different

In 1948, when we could easily have established a Palestinian state in the large territories offered 

by the UN, and instead joined with five Arab armies in an attempt to destroy Israel and erect Palestine in its place.

Between 1949 and 1967, we could have established a Palestinian state in the West Bank while it was still under Jordanian control, and in the Gaza Strip governed by Egypt.

During the 1970s, instead of thanking Jordan's King Hussein for taking in Palestinian refugees, 

Yasser Arafat and the PLO tried to overthrow him. The result was a civil war and the expulsion of the Palestinian leadership from Jordan to Lebanon.

Once in Lebanon, we set about creating a terrorist state-within-a-state, bent on subverting

 Lebanese sovereignty and attacking Israel. The Israelis consequently entered south Lebanon, and with the support of the Shi'ites there, we were expelled once again, this time to Tunisia.

Under Palestinian influence, Tunisia then became a hotbed of crime and international 

conspiracies, again endangering our hosts.

We are now following the same pattern in Syria. The Palestinian leadership first betrayed 

Syria's then President Hafez Assad in 1982, when elements of the PLO fought, together with the 

rebels, against the regime in Homs and Hama. Now, in the Syrian civil war, some Palestinian movements, mainly in the Yarmouk refugee camp, are fighting together with the rebels against 

President Bashar Assad.

Yasser Arafat stupidly supported Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, a choice that led to the 

expulsion from the area of 400,000 Palestinian white- and blue-collar workers, and doing untold 

damage to the Palestinian cause. When Saddam Hussein was defeated and the Iraqis withdrew 

from Kuwait, the extent of Arafat's mistake became evident. The Gulf States came to regard 

Palestinians as traitors and alienated themselves from the Palestinian cause, overtly for a long 

time and covertly — with the exception of Qatar — to this day.

The same pattern of ingratitude and thick-headedness is also being repeated by Hamas, the 

Palestinian terrorist organization that rules the Gaza Strip. While totally disregarding what 

Egypt sacrificed for the sake of the Palestinian cause in its many wars against Israel, senior 

Hamas officials are now working to undermine Egypt and its president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, by supplying the Islamic State in the Sinai Peninsula with arms and training.

Hamas, composed of Sunni Muslims, has also become the willing dupe of the Iran, which is 

Shi'ite. Hamas is therefore openly collaborating with the arch-enemy of Sunni Saudi Arabia and 

the other Sunni Gulf States. Iran has promised Hamas arms and money to circumvent the 

Palestinian Authority (PA), in an attempt to topple it. The Iranians are also trying to trying to 

convert members of Hamas, and eventually all Palestinians, to Shi'ite Islam.

Recently, a senior official of the Fatah's Central Committee, Abbas Zaki, spoke out in favor of 

Iran's plot. His remarks will not only help Hamas in its attempts to overthrow the Palestinian 

Authority, but could mean the end of Saudi Arabian and other Sunni-Arab Gulf States' support 

for the Palestinian cause. On March 11, all 22 members of the Arab League officially branded 

Hezbollah — Iran's proxy — a terrorist organization because it collaborates with the Syrian 

regime in slaughtering Sunnis, has terrorist cells in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, and fights in the

 ranks of Yemen's Houthi Shi'ite rebels against Saudi Arabia and other Sunni countries.

It has become painfully clear that, regardless of political affiliation, the Palestinian leadership is motivated only by greed — with no thought to the interests of the Palestinian people.

Palestinians did not bypass the Arab politicians in the Israeli Knesset, who are among the worst offenders, as well. As soon as the Arab League voted to designate Hezbollah a terrorist 

organization, three Arab Israeli parliamentarians, who were elected to represent Arabs inside 

Israel, condemned the decision. In comical language that sounded as if it had come straight out 

of the Cold War Kremlin, they said that declaring Hezbollah a terrorist group served the 

interests of “the reactionary Arab states loyal to Israel and the United States.” The objective, 

they claimed, was to neutralize Hezbollah in order to damage the security of the “Arab nation;” 

turn the war towards the destruction of Lebanon, and get rid of anything that could stop 

America and Israel's imperialistic plans for the Middle East in general and Palestine in particular.

One can only ask why we, Sunni Palestinians, should support the Shi'ite Hezbollah, which 

slaughters Sunni Muslims in Syria and subverts Arab states while serving Iran's desire to keep 

Syria's Assad in power. What do these three Arab members of Israel's Knesset think they have in common with Hezbollah?

Why, throughout its history, have the Palestinians been the victims of so many irresponsible 

leaders who harm their own constituents? What makes the radicals of Hezbollah more appealing

 to some Arab Israeli legislators than the radicals of ISIS? Do those honorable Arab Knesset 

members not understand the damage they do to the Palestinian cause by challenging the Sunni 

Arab states, which have contributed so much to us — both politically and economically — over 

the years?

Historically, the Palestinian “liberation organizations” have had no ideology or motivation 

beyond the destruction of the State of Israel. They are all proxies of the countries funding them, 

instead of acting in accordance with the authentic national interests of the Palestinian people. In 

the instance of the three Arab Israeli legislators, they evidently followed instructions from the 

Iranians. Instead of bringing jobs, water and better education — as they promise when they 

stand for election — they sell out their people for a few crumbs of headline attention. They self-importantly parrot the Iranian line with no regard for the needs of the people who voted for them. They cynically exploit their parliamentary immunity and the defense provided them by a country they

 call their sworn enemy, in order to support Hezbollah and Iran, which are comfortably 

manipulating them.

Iran just wants to get its foot in the door. That is the reason the Iranian regime is so persistent in 

courting the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas, both Sunni organizations (as well as its own 

Gaza proxy group, Al-Sabireen), while it slaughters Sunnis in Syria and Iraq, and puts agents in 

place to overturn the Sunni governments of Bahrain, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

Can Iran's plot possibly be a secret from the Israeli Arab Knesset members, whose support of 

Hezbollah harms the interests of the Arabs inside Israel? Have these three members of Knesset 

forgotten the thousands of missiles Hezbollah fired into the Galilee, where so many Israeli Arabs live? Do they not understand that if Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah carries out his threat to bomb 

an ammonia installation in the Haifa area, thousands of Israeli Arabs will be killed? With the 

generous “help” of our Palestinian leaders — and especially with the “help” of the treacherous Europeans who keep on enabling them — any real help for the Palestinians, and the top of our 

mountain, look more distant than ever.

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah recently threatened to launch missiles at an ammonia 

installation in northern Israel, which could kill tens of thousands of civilians — including 

thousands of Israeli Arabs.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++4) Iran: We designed our missiles to hit 

Israel from a safe distance

That is a clear declaration of war. And at the same time they warned the U.S. to back off 

and remember who’s boss.

“Iranian military official warns US: Stay away from Iran’s red lines,” Jerusalem Post, April 4, 

2016:

Iran warned the US on Monday that any attempt to encroach on the Islamic Republic’s ballistic 

missile program would constitute the crossing of a “red line.”

“The US calculations about the Islamic Republic and the Iranian nation are fully incorrect,” 

Iranian Deputy Chief of Staff Brig-Gen Masoud Jazayeri was quoted by the Fars News Agency 

as saying.

“The White House should know that defense capacities and missile power, specially at the 

present juncture where plots and threats are galore, is among the Iranian nation’s red lines and a 

backup for the country’s national security and we don’t allow anyone to violate it,” Jazayeri said.

Jazayeri accused US President Barack Obama of making vows and breaking them by saying 

removal of sanctions on Iran would be conditioned on the Islamic Republic halting its ballistic 

missile program.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) test-fired two ballistic missiles last month 

that it said were designed to be able to hit Israel, defying a threat of new sanctions from the 

United States.

The launches followed the test-firing of several missiles as part of a major military exercise that

 the IRGC says is intended to “show Iran’s deterrent power and… ability to confront any threat”.

The IRGC fired two Qadr missiles from northern Iran which hit targets in the southeast of the 

country 1,400 kms (870 miles) away, Iranian agencies said. The nearest point in Iran is around 

1,000 km from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

“The reason we designed our missiles with a range of 2000 km is to be able to hit our enemy the

 Zionist regime from a safe distance,” Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh was quoted as 

saying by the ISNA agency….

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++