Monday, June 9, 2014

Eat More Blueberries! True Perspective on Savannah Port. Constant Incompetence!


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More about blueberries. Eat more blueberries! (See 1 below.)
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Savannah's Port is critical to Savannah, Georgia and America.

The Skidaway Island Republican Club, of which I am a Board member,  is having another one of its informative True Perspective meetings.

Our goal is to inform all citizens regardless of party or political affiliation on matters of common interest. (See 2 below.)
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More about the employment out look.

I share  El-Erian's view. The easy re-employment with lower paying jobs has occurred. Now the structural/secular un-employment must be addressed and that is another and more difficult issue to resolve without increasing inflationary risks.

Education and vocational training remains one of the more critical components to the solution of this puzzle in addition to Fed policy.  (See 3 below.)
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I posted this previously but deserves re-posting:

Here are six Conundrums of socialism in the United States of America:


 1. America is capitalistic and greedy
yet half of the population is subsidized.

2. Half of the population is subsidized
yet they think they are victims.

3. They think they are victims
yet their representatives run the government.

4. Their representatives run the government
yet the poor keep getting poorer.

5. The poor keep getting poorer
yet they have things that people in other countries only dream about.

6. They have things that people in other countries only dream about
yet they want America to be more like those other countries.
 
And that, my friends, pretty much sums up the USA in the 21st Century.

Makes you wonder who is doing the math.
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A sober assessment from Israel's IDF Chief of Staff.  (See 4 below.)

Glick on Abbas. (See 4a below.)
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Ed Morrissey discusses Obama's relentless incompetency. . (See 5 below.)
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Why women carry purses :http://safeshare.tv/w/HtsNZejCuU
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Dick
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1)Food of the Week . . . Blueberries

Did you know that, in a study analyzing 60 fruits and vegetables for their antioxidant capabilities, blueberries came out on top? Antioxidants help protect against oxidative stress. Oxidation, a natural and necessary occurrence in the body, can be accelerated to excessive levels by environmental and dietary factors that create excessive amounts of highly reactive molecules called free radicals. Free radicals have been associated with conditions as varied as cataracts, glaucoma, varicose veins, hemorrhoids, peptic ulcers, heart disease, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer's disease and all forms of cancer. Blueberries are packed with anthocyanins, phytonutrients that not only provide these berries with their dark blue color, but (along with other phytonutrients such as resveratrol, ellagic acid, and vitamin C), prevent these oxidized molecules from directly damaging cells. 

The Latest News about Blueberries
In terms of U.S. fruit consumption, blueberries rank second only to strawberries in popularity of berries. Blueberries are not only popular, but also repeatedly ranked in the U.S. diet as having one of the highest antioxidant capacities among all fruits, vegetables, spices and seasonings.
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2)
SIRC June 12 True Perspectives Reminder
The Savannah Container Terminal
View this email in your browser
The Savannah Container Terminal

THE  ECONOMIC  ENGINE  THAT  DRIVES  GEORGIA  AND  THE  SOUTHEAST
A Skidaway Island Republican Club True Perspectives Presentation

By Mr. Leo Beckmann
Mgr. of Gov’t. Affairs, GA Ports Authority

Thursday, June 12, 2014 at 5 PM in the Plantation Clubhouse BR

Members Bar will open at 4:30, and there will be nibbles available.

We encourage you to join your friends and neighbors to enjoy some social time
followed by an educational session.

Sustaining Members may attend with no charge; Regular members at $5 per
person; and non-members at $10 per person.

Please make your reservations with:
Dick Miller
16 Marsh Tower Lane
hrmatthelandings @ gmail.com
912-598-5049
Copyright © 2014 SIRC, All rights reserved.
You are receiving this email because you are a member of the SIRC or you signed up to receive email communications. Visit www.skidawayrepublicanclub.com

Our mailing address is:
SIRC
P.O. Box 15165
Savannah, GA 31416
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3)   El-Erian: Jobs Market Hasn't Hit the Wall

By Mohamed El-Erian

Friday’s highly anticipated U.S. jobs report sheds light on a crucial question for the economy: How much more can the Federal Reserve do to stimulate growth and push down unemployment before it runs into undesirable inflationary consequences?
Economists have long been engaged in a discussion about the nature of unemployment in the 

U.S.: Is it more short-term and cyclical, or is it more structural and long-term? In the former case, accelerating growth can bring the unemployment rate back down to where it was before the crisis. In the latter case, the "natural rate" of unemployment would be higher, impairing the economy's ability to create jobs and grow without stoking inflation beyond the asset markets.
Until recently, the debate was largely academic: Given the depth of the economic downturn, everybody recognized that there were lots of jobs to recover before unemployment fell anywhere near its natural rate. Moreover, with political polarization on Capitol Hill undermining a comprehensive policy response, there wasn’t much interest in figuring out how the natural rate itself could be improved.

Now, though, the question is gaining urgency. The widely followed U-3 unemployment rate has fallen to 6.3 percent, down from a 2009 peak of 10 percent and approaching — albeit frustratingly slowly — the pre-crisis low of 4.4 percent. Yet economists have yet to agree on a threshold beyond which inflation (outside the asset markets) might become a problem. Nor have they converged on a narrative about an important determinant of job creation -- the level and composition of economic growth.

One group is quick to point to bad weather as the major cause for slow growth and sluggish job creation this year. They predict a sharp and relatively quick growth rebound, supported by evidence that underlying financial conditions are gradually improving. Another group is a lot more cautious. They believe that the U.S. faces secular headwinds that are consequential and durable, especially if Congress continues to dither in performing its economic governance responsibilities.

Increasingly, neither policy makers nor markets will have the luxury of pursuing multiple narratives. As more jobs are created, and particularly if the participation rate remains stuck at its multi decade low, the Federal Reserve and investors will have to come to a more definitive view of the relative weight of structural and secular headwinds to America’s labor market recovery. It's particularly important for the Fed in the months to come, given the country’s heavy reliance on monetary policy. It will be one of the important determinants of whether history books end up characterizing the current period as a hand off to economic liftoff and durable market prosperity, or the preamble to a policy mistake and a market accident.
So, what does Friday’s jobs report tell us? At first blush, it provides some support for both views.

The cyclical camp will take comfort in the solid pace of monthly job creation. At 217,000, May’s increase in non-farm payrolls is above the prior two-month average of just under 200,000. It takes the total number of employed back above the prior peak of 138 million, attained in January 2008.

The structural camp will focus on the persistence of long-term unemployment (still stuck above 4 million), the failure of the labor-force participation rate to rebound from unusually low levels, and the persistent very high unemployment among less educated workers.
Still, the report does provide some useful insights for the Fed, and for market participants who have been trading on the back of Fed policy.

Once again, and despite the solid job creation, earnings growth remains anemic. As such, it is hard to make a strong case that the labor market is getting too tight overall. There are more jobs to be gained before the natural rate becomes a binding constraint, and before the current monetary policy stance goes from being economically enabling to disruptive. This validates the Fed's pivot from focusing on a single job metric (the U-3 measure of unemployment) to a more holistic assessment of labor market conditions.

While the period of easy gains in reducing excessive unemployment is behind us, there is still scope for addressing the cyclical component of a problem that is central to U.S. economic prosperity and a less unequal society. In a perfect world, our politicians would use this window to work on the other, more protracted component of the unemployment problem — that of long-term unemployment. Unfortunately, there is little to suggest that this will happen anytime soon.
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4) 

IDF chief: Dramatic armament taking place in Gaza

Despite a period of relative calm between Israel and Gaza, terrorists in the Palestinian enclave are arming themselves with missiles that can reach deep into Israel’s heartland, IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz declared Monday.
Speaking at the Herzliya Conference, an annual national security gathering at the Interdisciplinary Center in the central coastal town, Gantz gave a sweeping overview of Israel’s security situation, saying instability was everywhere, but military deterrence was working to keep war at bay.
Gantz said Hamas in the Gaza Strip was not looking for another war with Israel, but terrorists there were still undertaking a “dramatic” replenishing of their missile stockpiles.
In Gaza there has been “a dramatic increase in medium- and long-range rockets,” he said.
His statement came hours after two rockets were fired out of Gaza at southern Israel, causing no damage.
Gantz said that the Lebanon-based terror group Hezbollah also had no immediate plans to attack Israel, given the potential consequences.
“Hezbollah is deterred,” he said. “It knows what will happen if it enters a war against us, and that it will push Lebanon dozens of years backward.”
On Iran and its nuclear program, Gantz commented that “Iran’s desire to negotiate with the West is a result of its isolation and the newfound power of the street in the Middle East.”
He sounded relatively optimistic about the P5+1′s ongoing negotiations with the Islamic Republic, asserting that “with enough resolve, it’s possible to prevent Iran from getting nukes, whether with force or without.”
But what was a repeated theme throughout his address was the instability and unpredictability of the region.
“Jihadists are remaking the Sykes-Picot borders of old,” Gantz noted, referring to the World War I-era secret lines dividing the Middle East between British and French spheres of influence.
“We must remain vigilant and prepared, but we also cannot tell you what the story will be tomorrow. If we are sitting and enjoying a cup of espresso at 9:30 a.m., by 10:30 a.m. we could be at war.”
Gantz also touched upon Syria, with considerably less optimism: “It is like a deck of cards which has collapsed. As long as [President Bashar] Assad is in power, there will be no effective solution. I expect we could see another decade of violence there.”
He also warned against cutting Israel’s defense budget. According to Gantz, “We have no alternative but to stand here as a strong and united nation.”

4a) The West is being played by Arafat's successor --- and that includes Israel. It must stop. Now. But who has the cojones to do it? 
 Mahmoud Abbas must be great at cards.
The PLO chief has no real assets to speak of.
He's physically unattractive. He has zero charisma. He's old.
And no matter how hard he tries, Abbas can't do much of anything to dampen public support for Hamas or raise public support for himself. By many accounts, if elections are ever held, Hamas would win them in a walk.
As for money, beyond the PLO's slush fund, all Abbas has is what outsiders give him. He is completely dependent on the Americans, the Israelis, the Europeans and the Gulf states. Without them, he would have nothing to buy people's loyalty with.
If the money ever stops coming in, he'll go broke and lose power immediately.
Militarily, if Israel ever stops lending military support to Abbas's forces, it will be a matter of weeks, or perhaps days, before Abbas will be forced to surrender to Hamas.
And yet today Abbas is sitting pretty on the top of the volcano that is Arab politics, dictating terms for people with real power while playing mind-boggling radical politics.
And he's winning big.
This has been a great year for Abbas. In exchange for agreeing to humor the Obama administration with "negotiations" consisting of rejecting pro-Palestinian American peace proposals while refusing face-to-face contact with Israel for nine months, he got the Americans to force Israel to release several dozen terrorist murderers from prison.
He then abandoned the negotiations and effectively ended the peace process when he signed onto 15 international agreements as "the president of Palestine," seeking to gain international recognition for a Palestinian state that is in a de facto state of war with Israel.
From there he went on secure his own power at the helm of Palestinian politics by signing the unity deal with Hamas.
It's a win-win deal for Abbas and the genocidal jihadist group.
The deal frees Hamas from the financial burden of governing Gaza. The slack will be made up by the PA's US, European and Israeli-financed budget.
Hamas will be able to go back to using all of its own funds to run its 20,000-man army and expand its already massive arsenal of missiles.
Just as important, it will be able to rebuild its military and political infrastructures in Judea and Samaria.
Moreover, as a partner in the government, Hamas will have veto power over many of the Palestinian Authority's governing decisions, so there will be no negotiations, no recognition, no cessation of terror assaults and no peace with Israel with this Palestinian government. Then again, none of these things was forthcoming with Abbas at the helm at any time.
As for Abbas, by signing the deal, he gets to deploy a ceremonial force to Gaza that will enable him to tell willfully credulous Americans that he is now in charge of Gaza, so they should feel comfortable giving him more taxpayerfunds.
Abbas's unity deal with Hamas renders the entire Palestinian Authority a terrorist organization. Modeled on Hezbollah's deal with the Lebanese political leadership, the unity agreement formalizes the PLO's role as Hamas's protector and defender on the international scene. And it enables Hamas, as a member of the PA, to receive open assistance of every kind for its terrorist operations in Gaza and Judea and Samaria alike.
Since unlike Fatah, Hamas is recognized as a terrorist organization by Israel, the US, the EU, the unity deal makes it unlawful for any of them to continue to cooperate with, let alone support, the PA in any way.
But that doesn't seem to matter.

The US and the EU raced to see which one would recognize the new government first, while pledging to continue funding the PA to the tune of nearly $2 billion per year.
In Israel, the Left, led by Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, insists that Israel mustn't cut off the PA, for doing so would end the peace process, which of course would be a disaster.
As for Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and the rest of his government, their non-rhetorical responses have been anemic.
So far the only financial steps the government has taken to curtail funding to the PA involves using some of the tax revenues Israel transmits to the PA to pay off some of the massive debt the Palestinians owe the Israel Electric Corporation. But Israel still turns over the remaining tax revenues to the PA. Israel remains the PA's financial lifeline.
And this brings us back to Abbas.
Abbas is a successful politician because he knows what he wants and he is able to make the most of the cards he's been dealt.
Abbas knows that his American, European and Israeli supporters are convinced they can't make it without him. They don't care that he is a radical. They will believe any lie -- no matter how flimsy -- to keep up the game of proclaiming him a moderate and a man of peace.
Abbas was certain that the same US, EU and Israeli Left that supported him through his demand to free terrorists, and to abrogate the property rights of Jews, the same forces that uphold him despite his rejection of Israel's right to exist, his material breaches of the agreements he personally signed, and his general bad faith, would support his decision to join forces with Hamas.
The Israeli Left's support for Abbas makes sense. Without Abbas it has no reason to exist. Without the myth that Israel has a Palestinian partner in peace, no one would give the likes of Livni the time of day. So she clings to him.
As for Netanyahu and his allies, their paralysis isn't rooted in dependence on Abbas. They, like Israel would be far better off without him.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------5)  Relentless Incompetence: Americans Are Giving Up on Obama 
BY ,
The Fiscal Times
Over the last several months, the American public has had a hard and clear look at the executive talent inside the White House, and has begun to despair for real leadership and competence .
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When leadership fails, people stop following. It appears in the sixth year of the Barack Obama presidency, that moment has arrived.
CNN’s most recent poll provided a clear indicator of this dynamic in the wake of two major controversies involving military issues. The results showed that Obama did not gain a majority of support for any of twelve issues surveyed from the respondents. In fact, in ten of the twelve issues, majorities disapproved of the President’s performance, and only on one – the environment, usually an overwhelming Democratic strength – did his approval exceed his disapproval, and only barely at 49/45. On the economy and health care, which the poll identified as the top two priorities of its respondents, Obama’s approval ratings sank to 38/61 and 36/63, respectively.
The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza assigns the change in polling to a crisis of leadership and competence in the White House. “The core of Obama’s appeal,” wrote Cillizza about the 2008 election “was the idea that he would restore competence back to the White House after President George W. Bush's eight years…. Obama openly embraced the idea that he was the anti-Bush on nothing much more than his commitment to putting the best people in the right places within his administration.”
Now, the series of disastrous scandals and unmistakable incompetence have completely eroded confidence in his leadership, Cillizza argues, pointing to a Pew poll series in which his perceived executive competence went from 70/15 in February 2009 to 43/51 in December 2013.
1) Obamacare. That final result came after the inexplicable failure of the White House to take much of an interest in the rollout of its central domestic-policy project – Obamacare. By December, the Healthcare.gov exchange that the Department of Health and Human Services had 42 months and upward of $400 million to build turned out to be a complete flop.
Millions of people who had been promised they could keep existing plans found their insurance canceled, and millions more who managed to enroll in a plan found that they couldn’t keep their doctor, as Obama had promised. In the face of these disasters, Obama scowled at the cameras, proclaimed himself madder than anyone, and … left the people in place who’d failed.
When the sheer weight of the mandate and its penalties convinced eight million Americans to finally sign-up through the still-buggy website by the twice-extended deadline, Obama claimed victory. Just this week, though, we discovered that two million Medicaid enrollees or more may not have been processed correctly in that still-faulty system, and may not have coverage after all.
Who could have guessed that leaving the same incompetents to run the system they couldn’t produce correctly in the first place would create more problems? Pretty much anyone with any actual executive or managerial experience, actually.
2) Department of Veterans Affairs. The lack of responsiveness at the VA was such an issue that Obama campaigned on it in 2008. He demanded a huge increase in funding from Congress, and the VA annual budget went up 78 percent during his presidency, with $235 billion more in funding during the last five-plus years over the FY2008 baseline.
However, the last time Obama sat down with VA Secretary Eric Shinseki prior to this spring had been in July 2012. It took whistleblowers telling the media that wait lists had been falsified at VA facilities and that dozens of veterans in Phoenix had died while being denied medical attention to shake the tree.
A subsequent internal audit showed that 64 percent of all VA facilities had instances of wait-list fraud, and that 13 percent of all schedulers had received training in how to commit it. Obama scowled at the cameras twice in this scandal, pronounced himself once again madder than anyone, and only finally accepted the resignation from Shinseki just before the second presser.
3) National Security. This week, we have another serious crisis, this time in national security, and the incompetence reached new heights. President Obama traded five high-ranking Taliban detainees at Guantanamo Bay for a soldier held captive for almost five years in Afghanistan. Two of the men released are wanted by the United Nations for war crimes, and one was a close associate of Osama bin Laden himself. Obama insisted he had confidence that the men posed no risk to American security while celebrating the return of an American service member.
Then the story began to fall apart. First, the White House mischaracterized the capture of Bowe Bergdahl as “on the battlefield” after serving “with honor and distinction.” The Pentagon had concluded in 2010 that Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl had in fact deserted his post, leaving behind a note to that effect and that at the least Bergdahl had wandered into Taliban territory on purpose.
Soldiers who served with Bowe Bergdahl erupted in outrage, accusing him of desertion and the Pentagon of actively suppressing the truth. State Department spokesperson Marie Harf responded to these first-person reports by soldiers who had served at the post Bergdahl abandoned by suggesting that they weren’t credible witnesses, while other White House insiders told NBC’s Chuck Todd that these soldiers were conducting a “swift boat” smear.”
Nor was that the only White House offense. A law passed with Obama’s signature requires 30-day notice before transferring any detainee out of Guantanamo Bay, let alone the highest-risk Taliban officials Obama released. The White House claimed there was no time to notify Congress before getting the deal done.
Yet the White House managed to put Bowe Bergdahl’s parents next to Obama for the Saturday announcement. They also insisted that the administration had ongoing consultations on the question of trading the five Taliban for Bergdahl. But the two chairs of the intelligence committees – Rep. Mike Rodgers, a Republican, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat – both said the last such consultation took place in 2011, and the overwhelming and bipartisan consensus opposed such a deal.
Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) later told Fox News that the file on Bergdahl given to the Senate Intelligence Committee when deliberating on this question never included Bergdahl’s note nor the testimony of other soldiers about the nature of his disappearance.
Obama asked Americans to accept his own assurances that the five released detainees would pose no threat to the United States. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel joined him in making those assurances and said that the cases had been reviewed thoroughly. The Daily Beast’s Eli Lake and Time Magazine separately reported, however, that the review had been rushed through to get the conclusion desired by the White House. Lake’s sources in the defense and intelligence communities called this “forcing the consensus,” while Time Magazine’s source made it even clearer. “There never was the conversation,” the official reported. “This was out of the norm.”
While Hagel backed Obama’s story, others at the Pentagon strongly disagreed. Fox reporter Jim Angle reported that one source in the military said, “Many at the Pentagon advised the President not to make the trade.” Senior officials at the Department of Defense had warned the White House that releasing these five detainees would be “like handing over five 4-star generals of the Taliban.” Releasing them now, rather than at the end of US participation in Afghanistan that Obama plans for 2016, puts more than 32,000 Americans in Afghanistan at risk of these high-ranking Taliban commanders’ re-entry into the war.
Nothing about Obama’s performance in these scandals and debacles should give anyone confidence in his assurances -- not of security, not of competence, not even of being madder than anyone. The polling numbers suggest that Americans have finally reached a point where the incompetence and dishonesty are just too obvious to ignore any longer.
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