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After The Feinstein CIA Intel Report was released Obama said: " This is not who we are."
I suggest: ' Obama is not who we need!"
Obama would rather blow terrorists to bits with drones, bombing them from the air and taking some innocents with them along the way, because that way he does not have to house them in Guantanamo and it is more moral!
Apparently Feinstein felt compelled to release this report for several reasons:
a) Political - she had gone along with the CIA's operation and needed to rewrite her own history because in January she is no longer in charge of that committee.
b) Personal: She was ticked at The CIA for allegedly investigating her staff who was preparing the report.
c) Feminine: "Hell hath no fury as a woman scorned," particularly if they are a powerful self-righteous Female Senator who needed to throw her weight around. (See 1 below.)
As for Obama he concluded it was important the report be released so we could prove to the world how transparent we are. This from a president who has been among the most lying, two faced and most opaque president in our nation's entire history.
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An analysis of why Israel is the world's most hated nation! (See 2 below.)
Will Israel attack Iran and dig their already hole deeper? (See 2a below.)
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Jonathan Gerber: If true this man is seriously stupid! (See 3 below.)
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Now let's turn to the 'contrite' and glib professor who believes we are stupid and who has been thrown under the Obama bus for telling the truth and then forgetting most everything else when he glibly lied. (See 4 below.)
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David Stockman is a realist. That is why politicians no longer care to listen to him. (See 5 below.)
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Canadian tongue and cheek! (See 6 below.)
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This is a simple story about Tom, Dick and Harry and greed.
When you work longer and harder having more things can become very unfair so to correct this two of the brothers solved the problem by justifying their actions because that is the way government works!
http://biggeekdad.com/2014/11/tom-dick-harry/
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Dick
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1)
Blitzer to Feinstein: ‘I Assume You Would Feel Guilty’ if Americans are Killed Because of CIA Report
By Bridget Johnson
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) defended the release of the CIA enhanced interrogation report in a testy exchange with CNN today, arguing that ISIS “may seize” upon the report, “they may not.”
Feinstein pushed for the release of the report in the waning days of her chairmanship before handing over the gavel to Republicans in the 114th Congress.
“Look, there is no perfect time to release this report,” she said when asked about the potential risk to American lives because of its publication, as the White House warned Monday. “This began 12 years ago. We have worked for five-and-a-half years to document records as to what happened.”
Feinstein accused host Wolf Blitzer of doing “a good job, certainly, of hyping the warnings.”
“Is it possible that something would happen?” she said. “Yes. But it’s possible that something happens even without this. There have been beheadings. There have been attacks without this report coming out. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t clean our house. It doesn’t mean that an Intelligence Committee that has worked for five-and-a-half years to put together a cogent report that we believe will stand the test of time shouldn’t release it.”
“The world is an unstable place. You know as well as I do, ISIL is pure evil. They may seize upon it, they may not. But they are going to continue to behead. They are going to continue to destroy. They are going to continue to kill innocent people until they are stopped. And I deeply believe that.”
The report, the senator said, is “what America is all about. We admit our mistakes. We commit ourselves to never let these mistakes happen again. And that’s what this is all about.”
“But if Americans are killed as a result of this report and they tell you that, I assume you would feel guilty about that,” Blitzer replied.
“I would feel very badly, of course. I mean what do you think, Wolf Blitzer?” Feinstein shot back.
“But we lose control. At the end of this year, the Republicans take control. And there’s some evidence that this report would never see the light of day,” she continued. “We believe it should see the light of day. And let me say this. This is a 400-plus-page summary. It is not the 4,600 page documentary of all of the detail of what happened. That can be declassified and released one day at an appropriate time.”
“But in the meantime, to get out what the executive summary said, that these EITs did not work, that the program was not well administered, that it was not well managed, I think, is extraordinarily important. That, yes, there were black sites where people who were not qualified to do the interrogation did interrogation.”
She then dug into what “CNN is doing this these days.”
“You are really hyping it to a point — obviously, they’re going to take 96 hours before the report came out to secure all our facilities,” she said of the extra security ordered for U.S. installations worldwide.
Blitzer noted that they’re simply reporting on what the FBI, DHS and Pentagon have been telling U.S. personnel around the globe.
“Do you have a question?” Feinstein retorted.
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2)Making David into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel
by Joshua Muravchik
(New York: Encounter Books, 2014)
Can there be any doubt that Israel is the most reviled country in the world today? No other nation engenders as much scorn, whether measured in newspaper column inches, street protests, or computer pixels. The only aspect of the hatred more disturbing than its virulent omnipresence is how out of proportion it is to Israel’s real (and alleged) wrongdoing. North Korea functions as a vast gulag, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad deploys chemical weapons on children, and the Castro brothers have ruled despotically over their Cuban island fiefdom for five decades running, but none of these dictatorial regimes invite anywhere near the scrutiny, never mind spittle-flecked loathing, engendered by the Jewish democratic state. A majority of Europeans, according to polls, consider this tiny country of eight million people to be the greatest threat to world peace. An Israeli soldier fires a rubber bullet in the West Bank and it will generate venomous crowds in cities around the globe; Iranian paramilitary basij forces murder peaceful demonstrators in broad daylight and the world emits barely a peep of protest.
Why the Jewish state generates such disproportionate anger is the subject of Joshua Muravchik’s thorough and careful study, Making David into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel. The easy answer is anti-Semitism, and while hatred of Jews certainly does factor in generating hostility to Israel, this cannot be the only explanation. We know this because Israel, ever since its founding in 1948, has been a Jewish state, and yet its status as the world’s polecat was not earned until decades later. Muravchik’s answer to the question is multifaceted, and he devotes a chapter each to several elements which, he contends, have contributed to Israel’s unenviable position, from the “Power of Oil” utilized by the Arab states as a weapon of political blackmail, to the volte-face of the Socialist International, the worldwide association of center-left political parties that once stood foursquare behind the Jewish state.
Much of the reason for the shift in world attitudes can be attributed to a basic change in the optics of the Middle East conflict. When Israel declared its independence on May 14, 1948, it did so as a nascent nation of Holocaust survivors and steely agrarian pioneers, surrounded by hostile Arab armies intent on finishing what the Nazis had started. In these circumstances, it is not difficult to understand why Israel earned the admiration of so many people around the world during the first years of its precarious existence, among Americans—many of whom, as Christians, felt a religious obligation to support the return of Jewish sovereignty in the Holy Land—in particular.
Israel accepted the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, which would have divided the British Mandate territory between Arabs and Jews and placed Jerusalem under a form of international trusteeship. The Arabs rejected it, choosing war over compromise. When Israel won that war, it also won the admiration of much of the (non-Arab and non-Muslim) world. Here was a plucky little nation, a young democracy, defending itself against annihilationist aggression. Facing such challenges, the Israel of the middle twentieth century was easily identifiable as David battling for its very survival against the Arab Goliath.
The narrative, however, began to change following the Six-Day War of 1967. In the midst of defending itself against yet another Arab attempt to destroy it, Israel came into possession of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, territories that had, up until that time, been illegally occupied by Jordan and Egypt, respectively. Both parcels of land were populated with Arabs, many of whom had fled from Mandate Palestine—either on their own volition or because they were driven from their homes by Israeli troops—in 1948. Now, the conflict could be reframed not as that of little Israel against the vast Arab world, but rather, between mighty Israel and the occupied, stateless Palestinians (who had only recently begun to embrace a distinct “Palestinian,” as opposed to Arab, national identity). In shorthand, Israel’s struggle to exist alongside its neighbors in peace went from being known as the Arab-Israeli conflict (in which it was undeniably David) to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (in which its enemies could claim that it was actually Goliath).
No longer was the saga of Israel one of a long-stateless people returning to their national home and defending it against the legions of the Arab world. “Instead of proclaiming openly their determination to deny the Jews a state,” Muravchik writes, “Israel’s enemies now accused the Jews of denying that same right to another people, the Palestinians.” Ruling over an occupied population, Israel and its sympathizers would have more difficulty portraying it as the underdog. This is the major reasons that the international left, which (at least theoretically) loves underdogs, turned on Israel.
Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union had initially backed the Yishuv, as the pre-statehood Jewish community in Palestine was known, which it saw as a beachhead of socialism and a worthy irritant to its new Cold War adversary, Great Britain. But soon after Israel’s War of Independence, Moscow’s strategic calculation changed as the Jews outlived their usefulness as enemies of London. The Soviets now made a play for the sympathies of the Arab world. Suddenly, Moscow had gone from being the savior of the Jewish state (it was a last-minute arms shipment from Czechoslovakia, authorized by Stalin, that had rescued Israel in 1948) to the world headquarters of “anti-Zionist” (often barely disguised anti-Semitic) propaganda.
Moscow’s decision to back the Arabs against Israel provided a foretaste of what was to come from the global left. The story of the world’s turning against Israel is largely the story of the left turning against Israel, and few are better equipped to tell that sad and disgraceful tale than Muravchik. A former national chairman of the Young People’s Socialist League, he is well acquainted with the history of left-wing movements around the world. In America, support for Israel was widespread on the American left; as an example, Muravchik cites the figure of Senator Wayne Morse, one of only two votes against the Tonkin Gulf resolution authorizing the Vietnam War, who went so far as to urge President Lyndon Johnson to break Gamal Abdel Nasser’s naval blockade of the Jewish state with American military force. Senator Eugene McCarthy, later a hero to the anti-war movement, said that America had “the legal and moral obligation” to defend Israel militarily from aggression.
It would take some time for left-wing attitudes to evolve in a direction more critical of Israel, and one of the earliest, and most influential voices in turning the tide was Bruno Kreisky, the postwar Austrian chancellor and influential mover and shaker within the Socialist International. A deracinated Jew, Kreisky was ashamed and embarrassed by his patrimony, which he (correctly) viewed as an obstacle to his political ascent in a country as deeply anti-Semitic as Austria. Viennese Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal, whose campaign to bring Nazi war criminals to justice greatly annoyed an Austrian public that largely considered itself Hitler’s “first victim,” was a “Jewish fascist,” Kreisky alleged, heading an organization that acted like a “mafia.” Ingratiating himself with his constituents, Kreisky assured that “one finds reactionaries also among us Jews, as well as thieves, murderers, and prostitutes.”
Kreisky was a despicable character, the sort of man for whom the term “self-hating Jew” was created. Muravchik makes a strong case for him as the spark that ignited the fire of anti-Israelism in Europe. Kreisky was well attuned to changes within the global left, which, having exhausted the Marxist dictums of proletarian class struggle, was taking up the cause of third-worldist revolution against the “imperialist powers,” usually defined as the Western powers, Israel foremost among them. Under Kreisky and his German colleague Willy Brandt, the former Social Democratic chancellor of West Germany, the Socialist International adopted a neutralist position in the Cold War. This was a serious shift for an organization founded as a resolutely anti-Communist, pro-Western force in global affairs (few had suffered so grievously under communism as social democrats). Going further, in 1979, Kreisky welcomed PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat to Vienna. “Such a refugee as I once was,” Kreisky, who had lived in exile during World War II, said by way of explaining his personal interest in the PLO, “has special understanding for movements of a similar kind,” effectively likening Israel to Nazi Germany. Thus was a trope born. On his own initiative, Kreisky issued a report suggesting that European governments adopt a “less emotional posture” to the Middle East conflict, that is, presumably, one unburdened by feelings of a European responsibility to the Jewish state.
The shift by the Socialist International, Muravchik argues, was reflective of deeper currents within the global left. Spurred by the rise of the “New Left,” and its ambition of a “third force” in global affairs standing between American capitalism and Soviet communism, the non-communist left underwent an “ideological transformation” in which the struggle of “the third world against the West . . . replaced the older Marxist model of proletariat versus bourgeoisie.” Despite its absorption of many Jews from Arab lands, Israel was placed within this simplistic framework as a symbol of Western, imperialist domination.
Kreisky embodied the transformational European attitude to Israel in another important way: he was a reliable appeaser of terrorism. In 1973, when a group of Palestinian commandos seized a train carrying Soviet Jewish refugees on their way from Czechoslovakia into Austria, Kreisky acceded to their demand that he shut down the processing station in Vienna through which Soviet emigrants had been making their way to Israel. Known as the Schönau ultimatum—named after the old castle in which the transit facility was located—this decision came to symbolize the European response to Arab terrorism, which was one of continual placation.
Indeed, the Schönau incident demonstrates how some of the reasons for the world’s turn against Israel are breathtakingly simple. Today, critics of the Jewish state spend a great deal of time lambasting the behavior of its government, its wartime tactics, and the nature of the occupation, to name just a few subjects of reproach. But intellectual arguments attacking the validity of Zionism as a national movement, or ideological attempts to portray Israel as an imperialist “settler colonial state,” or the often unfair and excessive attacks on the methods by which Israel protects itself, obscure the simpler and grubbier reasons that often underlie opposition to Israel: cowardice, particularly in Europe, in face of the sheer number of Arab and Muslim states, those countries’ power over the global oil supply, and the unscrupulous tactics to which they have resorted to get their way.
In his chapter “The Uses of Terrorism,” Muravchik provides a short history of terrorism in the late 1960s and 1970s, when Arab non-state actors (which were often backed by the Soviets or other despotic, anti-Western regimes) perfected the spectacular arts of kidnapping and hijacking. To younger readers who were not alive at the time, such as this writer, it will seem as if there was an international airline hostage incident every week throughout this period. While Israel, through force of sheer necessity and will, had effectively made their national carrier, El Al Israel Airlines, hijack-proof, Europeans could almost always be counted upon to give the terrorists whatever they wanted: money, planes, or the release of other terrorists imprisoned (under light sentences) for earlier terrorist outrages.
Similarly with oil, many countries caved in to Arab demands, particularly after the 1973 energy crisis. The wielding of this weapon was “enough to cause a permanent readjustment of the balance of political influence between Israel and the Arabs.” Willing to use ruthless violence against civilians and buttressed by its control over much of the world’s oil supply, it was only a matter of time before the Arabs would be able to channel their influence through an institution like the United Nations, to whose abject politicization Muravchik devotes a maddening chapter.
Muravchik is not an uncritical apologist for the Israeli governments of past and present. A chapter on the 1982 Lebanon War, “Israel Shows a Less Endearing Face,” soberly recounts how the conflict earned Jerusalem a great deal of criticism, including from its friends. “Israel’s existence depends on its tenuous hold on the imagination of the West, and especially of the American people,” George Will, one of the Jewish state’s most eloquent defenders, wrote at the time, in a column cited by Muravchik. “That hold depends on Israel appearing familiar—part of the Western family. So Israel must not begin to appear bizarre.” The man who waged the Lebanon War, Prime Minister Menachem Begin, was the sort of Israeli leader unfamiliar to many Westerners; a member of the Likud party, he was not the warm and cuddly Labor Zionist to which many European socialists could relate.
Much like Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War helped give sustenance to America’s left-wing “adversary culture,” so did Begin spawn the rise of a left-wing counter-establishment in Israel. The newspaper Haaretz, the human rights organization B’Tselem, a cadre of “post-Zionist” academics, and a whole constellation of other nongovernmental organizations, many of them funded by European foundations, now work full-time exposing Israel’s foibles to the world. Some of them even question Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. Muravchik does not lament the existence of this adversary culture, which is, after all, an inevitable occurrence in any open and democratic society such as Israel’s. But he is distressed at the recklessness with which many of the country’s left-wingers hurl their accusations, readily gobbled up as they predictably are by a global industry of professional anti-Israel activists. While America can withstand the condemnations hurled at it by its domestic detractors, “the same cannot be said for Israel,” a once widely admired country that has become, perhaps ineluctably, the Jew among the nations.
James Kirchick is a fellow with the Foreign Policy Initiative.
2a) Rinsing Israel Out of Europe: The Zionistfrei Movement
In Britain, France, Spain and beyond, a drive to ban products from the Jewish state is picking up speed.
By Brendan O’Neill
In Nazi Germany, it was all the rage to make one’s town Judenfrei. Now a new fashion is sweeping Europe: to make one’s town or city what we might call “Zionistfrei”—free of the products and culture of the Jewish state. Across the Continent, cities and towns are declaring themselves “Israel-free zones,” insulating their citizens from Israeli produce and culture. It has ugly echoes of what happened 70 years ago.
Leicester City Council in England last month voted to boycott goods made in Israeli settlements in the West Bank. All services run by the council will be free of any product or technology made in any of the settlements. The motion “condemns the Government of Israel for its continuing illegal occupation of Palestine’s East Jerusalem and the West Bank” and resolves “to boycott any produce originating from illegal Israeli settlements.”
Leicester Mayor Peter Soulsby insists that there’s nothing anti-Semitic about this erection of an Israel-deflecting force field around the city, telling the local Leicester Mercury newspaper that it’s simply about expressing dismay with “the behavior of the Israeli state.”
But Jeffrey Kaufman, former president of Leicester’s Progressive Jewish Congregation, isn’t convinced. He wants to know why, “of all the horrible things going on in the world,” the council singled out Israel for punitive treatment. “It’s blatant anti-Semitism,” he said.
Other communities in Europe have gone further than Leicester. During this summer’s Gaza conflict, the town of Kinvara in western Ireland went completely Zionistfrei. Pro-Palestinian campaigners lobbied the town’s retailers, restaurants and cafes to expunge from their premises anything produced in Israel. All the businesses agreed, meaning Kinvara is now, in the eyes of anti-Israel agitators, morally pure. It is held up as a model town by numerous European backers of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, or BDS, movement.
Also during the Gaza conflict, the mayor of Newry in Northern Ireland wrote to all the retailers of his district asking them to provide a list of the Israeli products they stock. He then asked them to remove these products from sale—he was backed by 21 votes to three on the Newry Council.
Numerous Spanish provinces have this year been bombarded with requests to reject the “products, culture and sport” of the state of Israel. When BDS activists can’t get official backing for their desire to live Zionistfrei lives, they take things into their own hands. Three years ago in Montpellier, France, BDS activists spent an hour and a half rampaging through a shopping mall and “de-shelving” all the fruit produced in Israel.
Under pressure from campaigners to break off all links with Israel, the French city of Lille in October ripped up its twinning accord with the Israeli city of Safed. Roger Cukierman, president of the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions, was quoted in the French press saying Lille’s officials had shown a “heinous attitude toward the Israeli people.”
In 2011, the council of West Dunbartonshire in Scotland voted to boycott all Israeli products and instructed all local libraries to stop stocking books printed in the state of Israel. Why not just burn them?
Various towns in Turkey are shunning Coca-Cola over what they see as its support for Israel. Earlier this year, the mayor of Ordu in northern Turkey said “we boycott killer Israel and the global capital supporting it and do not drink its products,” as if anything made by Israel or its friends is some kind of poison liable to sully one’s body and soul.
The Zionistfrei movement isn’t really about effecting any change in the Middle East. As Leicester Councillor Mohammed Dawood admits, Israel is hardly going to be “trembling in its shoes” over the city’s boycott. Rather, the movement is about making the chattering classes in Europe feel pure and righteous, unsullied by the poisonousness of the state it’s now so fashionable to hate.
Where yesteryear’s creators of Judenfrei zones saw the Jewish people as a corrupting presence, today’s lobbyists for Zionistfrei territories see the Jewish state as corrupting, as a toxic entity whose fruit and technology and books must be shunned.
No, Jews aren’t being physically expelled from Europe, but they are being made to feel unwelcome. Given that most Jews feel affinity with the state of Israel, what must they think when they see parts of Europe being cleansed of all things Israeli? They must think: “My culture and my people are not wanted here.” And European Jews are voting with their feet. In the first eight months of this year, 4,566 Jews left France for Israel, more than the total number that left in 2013 (3,228). Last year a European Union survey found that 29% of Europe’s Jews had considered emigrating because they no longer feel safe.
BDS is one of the ugliest political movements of our time. It is shot through with double standards, treating Israel as more wicked than any other state. It is shrill and censorious, too. Its members boo and jeer and seek to expel from apparently civilized Europe not only Israeli military leaders and politicians but even Israeli violinists and actors. Now, the demand for Zionistfrei zones is taking BDS to its terrifying conclusion, that Israel and everyone associated with it (you know who) should be shunned by respectable communities everywhere.
Mr. O’Neill is editor of the online journal Spiked.
2b) SPECULATION CONCERNING ISRAELI PRE-EMPTIVE STRIKE ON IRANIAN NUCLEAR FACILITIES EMERGES AS U.S. PRIVATELY ACCUSES TEHRAN OF 'CHEATING'
Author: Algemeiner Staff
Speculation that Israel will launch a pre-emptive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities has emerged in the Israeli press, following the failure of international negotiators to reach a deal on the Tehran regime’s nuclear program by the agreed date of November 24.
Israeli website NRG says that in the event that current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wins the next parliamentary elections in March 2015, he will face the “difficult dilemma” of whether to strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities in June, one month before the next deadline for an agreement.
NRG emphasizes that the decision will be a fraught one, especially as military action is highly unlikely to gain the support of the Obama Administration, which regards a deal with Iran as vital to its political legacy. However, many Arab states, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia, are deeply unhappy with the American-led negotiations, as they too regard the weaponization of Iran’s nuclear program as an existential threat.
The NRG piece also quoted former leading Mossad official Haim Tomer as saying that the period leading up to July is the best time to increase sanctions on Iran, and not to reduce them. “The sanctions are being very effective, especially because of the drop in oil prices, and the economic collapse of Iran will force Iran to give up her dream,” Tomer said.
The talk of possible Israeli action – last seriously considered in 2011, before the current round of negotiations began – coincides with the revelation published in Foreign Policy by journalist Colum Lynch that Washington has “privately accused Iran of going on an international shopping spree to acquire components for a heavy-water reactor that American officials have long feared could be used in the production of nuclear weapons-grade plutonium.”
Lynch said that the White House has so far not acknowledged its displeasure with the Iranians publicly. But, Lynch said, the current objections “stand in stark contrast to recent remarks by Secretary of State John Kerry, who has repeatedly credited Tehran with abiding by the terms of the November 2013 pact, which bound Tehran to suspend some of its work at the Arak heavy-water reactor. ‘Iran has held up its end of the bargain,’ Kerry said last month in Vienna as he announced a seven-month extension of the timetable for big-power talks.”
Lynch observed: “The allegation is also sure to add to the mounting congressional unease over the administration’s ongoing talks with Tehran. Many lawmakers from both parties believe that the White House is making too many concessions to Tehran to cement a deal that it sees as central to the president’s legacy. With the GOP slated to take over the Senate next month, Iran hawks like Arizona Republican John McCain and Illinois Republican Mark Kirk are already promising to push through a new package of economic sanctions, a move that the White House believes would scupper the delicate talks with Tehran. Both men are likely to see the new U.N. allegations as proof that Tehran simply can’t be trusted to abide by the terms of a future deal.”
Separate research by the Institute for Science and International Security also documents Iranian violations in building up both its uranium and plutonium programs while negotiating under the rubric of the “Joint Plan of Action” (JPOA) agreed in Geneva last November.
Commenting on the latest revelations, Rep Ed Royce (R-CA), Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, announced: “This regime is proving to be a determined cheater, showing no willingness to accept an effective verification regime. Despite Iran’s deceit and intransigence, the Administration’s optimistic talk goes on. We are on our second negotiations extension. Iran is not addressing our fundamental verification and enrichment concerns. It is well beyond time for more sanctions pressure.”
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3)
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Yup, that was racism…………..had nothing to do with Stupidity
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4)
Gruber: Cog in White House Lie Machine
Tuesday, Jonathan Gruber, the MIT economist caught repeatedly on video calling the American public "stupid" and saying deception was essential to pass Obamacare, was dragged before the House Oversight Committee for a grilling. But he was a stand-in for the real culprit: President Obama. Lying about the health law originated at the top. In 2008, candidate Barack Obama promised that he, unlike his rivals, would not "force" Americans to buy health insurance. But that's what Obamacare does.
Gruber will soon be in the historic dustbin of rogues. But the Obama administration is still lying to defend its unpopular law.
Just last week, in two major announcements, Obama's top health officials claimed the Affordable Care Act is slowing health care spending and improving hospital safety. The media parroted these boasts, but the evidence shows they're bogus.
On December 3, federal actuaries reported that health spending inched up only 3.6 percent in 2013. Medicare Chief Marilyn Tavenner boasted that it's "evidence that our efforts to reform the health care delivery system are working." Sorry, not true. That 3.6 percent figure is an improvement only by a hair. The slowing of health care spending started before Obamacare passed. After two decades of health spending increases of 7.4 percent a year, spending growth slowed to a comfortable 3.8 percent in 2009 and stayed almost that low in 2010.
In 2010, Obama didn't want anyone to notice that health spending was growing at the slowest rate in a half-century. To pass his health bill, he needed a crisis. So he and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius repeatedly lied, warning that costs were "skyrocketing," spending was "spiraling" out of control and health needs would gobble up ever more GDP unless Congress quickly passed the Affordable Care Act.
Fast-forward, and there is nothing remarkable about the 3.6 percent rate in 2013. But there is bad news ahead. Federal actuaries predict health spending increases will nearly double soon, averaging 6 percent a year through 2023 and raising health spending to a staggering 19.3 percent of GDP, up from 16.6 percent before Obamacare.
So much for Obamacare controlling costs. Is it true that the president's health law is making hospitals safer? Don't bet on that either.
On December 2, Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell announced "demonstrable progress" in making hospital care safer. Her report claims that some 50,000 fewer patients died from infections, errors and other mishaps from 2010 to 2013, largely due to new payment incentives and a patient safety program in Obamacare. That happy claim was repeated verbatim by the media.
But Dr. Peter Pronovost, senior vice president at Johns Hopkins Medicine, and Dr. Ashish Jha of the Harvard School of Public Health had already warned in the New England Journal of Medicine that "it's nearly impossible to tell" whether the patient safety program's changes "led to better care."
Worse, the Obama administration bragged about reducing infections but didn't count the type of infection that kills the most patients, Clostridium difficile. That's like a kid's report card that leaves out reading and math. It doesn't tell the whole story. Truth is, C. diff is raging through hospitals, killing 14,000 patients a year and increasing the risk of death by 75 percent.
Finagling data is nothing new for this administration. Just weeks ago, it was caught red-handed inflating Obamacare enrollment numbers by counting dental plans.
Gruber's testimony mostly dodged the committee's angry questions. But one of his comments will be scrutinized in coming months, even perhaps by the Supreme Court. The issue is whether the Obama administration is breaking the law by offering subsidies in the 36 states that did not set up their own insurance exchanges. In January 2012, Gruber said those subsidies couldn't be offered there. But today he lied to protect the administration, claiming his earlier statement was speculating that the administration "might not create a federal exchange." That's an impossibility under the law. Sec. 1321 states that the secretary "shall" set up "such exchange" -- something Gruber clearly knows.
More proof that Gruber is just a cog in the White House lie machine.
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Betsy McCaughey Ph.D. is chairman of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths and a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research. To find out more about Betsy McCaughey and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
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5) Reagan Adviser David Stockman: Towering Federal Debt Is Hidden in a 'Roach Motel'
David Stockman, White House budget chief under President Reagan, notes it took the United States 205 years to reach $1 trillion in debt, but only 33 more years to get to the current $18 trillion debt mountain. And he says things are about to get worse.
In Stockman's recollection, the stage for today's fiscal irresponsibility in Washington, D.C. was set in the 1980s, when Congress finagled to show delayed revenue gains from tax increases and a massive payroll tax was buried in a Social Security rescue plan.
"Thereafter, Social security and Medicare entitlement reform was off the table due to the trick of the front-loaded payroll tax increase," he wrote on his Contra Corner blog.
"Likewise, the White House took any further tax increases or defense cuts off the table in January 1985. The spending-cut weary politicians of both parties, in turn, were more than happy to oblige by shelving any further meaningful domestic spending reductions, as well.
"So in 1985, fiscal policy went on automatic pilot — where it has more or less languished ever since."
Stockman estimated today's federal debt amounts to 106 percent of GDP, and when state and local debt is factored in, total government debt is 120 percent of GDP – a load that would put many Americans in a homeless shelter if they owed it money on an individual basis.
In his view, what makes today's titanic debt burden possible is concerted action by the Federal Reserve and other central banks to create massive credit expansion and the fact the Fed sells Treasurys to other countries.
"That convoy of money printers generated large but dangerous central bank 'vaults' where Uncle Sam's debt has been temporarily sequestered," Stockman noted.
"It was the equivalent of a monetary roach motel: the bonds went in, but they never came out."
In Stockman's view, the massive monetization of the public debt cannot go on much longer or the global monetary system will be destroyed.
He believes the rosy scenario currently projected by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) for 4 percent GDP growth in coming years is ridiculously optimistic and "does not have a snowball's chance of materializing over the next decade. Rather than $8 trillion of cumulative baseline deficits over the next 10 years as projected by CBO, the current policy stalemate in Washington — that has been running for 30 years now — will generate at least $15 trillion of new public debt in the decade ahead."
When that new debt is added to the current $18 trillion hole the nation has dug itself, the mountain of public debt will hit $33 trillion in 10 years, he wrote. At that point, Stockman estimates America's public debt will total a whopping 140 percent of GDP.
The federal debt has risen 70 percent under President Obama, and when it hit $18 trillion last week, it meant that each household in the U.S. now carries the burden of $124,000 in national debt alone — or $56,378 per individual, according to GoldCore's Mark O'Byrne.
"This does not include the massive private debt or household debt burden – people's mortgages, personal loans, credit card debt, student loans, car loans and other household debt," he wrote.
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