"According to newly released polling from Rasmussen Reports, by a margin of 15 percentage points (54 to 39 percent), likely voters now support the repeal of President Obama’s centerpiece legislation."Oops.
"President Barack Obama pounced. "Well, governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military's changed," he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. "We have these things called aircraft carriers where planes land on them ... ""This strikes me as the most accurate political analysis I've read so far this election season.
"But "sarcasm and condescension only work if the speaker's presumption of lofty superior knowledge is borne out by his command of actual facts," said Pastor Donald Sensing, a retired Army colonel."
"But facts and civility do matter to most Americans. A CBS panel of undecided voters in Ohio chose Mr. Romney, 6-2. A video of the dismay of CBS "This Morning" co-host Norah O'Donnell when this was reported is zipping across the Internet.
The Navy and shipbuilding are very important in southeast Virginia. With his wisecrack, the president may have kissed the state goodbye.
It isn't just in Virginia where Mr. Obama's fortunes are plummeting. When Missouri isn't a swing state, but Minnesota is, Democrats are in big trouble. No challenger who's cracked 50 percent in Gallup's tracking poll has ever lost. Mr. Romney is polling better at this point in the campaign than did every victorious challenger from 1968 on."
"Economist Timur Kuran coined the term to explain why totalitarian regimes usually collapse suddenly. A preference cascade happens when people discover millions of others share their doubts about the Great Leader. Massive media bias has made the term applicable here, Mr. Reynolds said. The Barack Obama that Americans saw in the debates bears little resemblance to the heroic figure portrayed by the news media."
"The biggest losers could be "mainstream" journalists. Their blatant bias has dropped trust in the news media to an all-time low. It'll plunge further if more evidence of collusion with the administration emerges. Nobody trusts a liar. There will be bankruptcies."
"“All of us have been shocked by the force of mother nature,” said the president, who was expected to visit Atlantic City on Wednesday."Only a fool or a liar would be shocked by a category 1 hurricane. Before the storm Obama declared all preparations had been made and that there had been close cooperation between federal, state and local officials. Yet they were completely unprepared.
Bloomberg shut down all 468 stations. More government failure."With about 900,000 customers already without power in New York City and its neighborhood, officials at Consolidated Edison, New York City’s utility, have said it could be up to a week before full power restoration.John Miksad, Consolidated Edison Senior Vice President, said though they had anticipated mass outages, but the storm surge was even higher.Some power cuts, he noted, had been earlier initiated to lessen storm damage. Certain cuts were because of an explosion at a Con Ed substation.He estimated it would take up to a week to restore power cut to the substation explosion. Fixing power lost to downed lines is going to take the longest, Miksad said."
"Rainstorms often cause large amounts of pollution to flow to the beach, overwhelming aging and poorly designed sewage and stormwater systems."Government failure.
"Beach closings and warnings due to pollution nearly doubled along New York and New Jersey coastlines, the report documents."
"“This is a Sophie’s Choice: If we respond to the moral imperative to raise public awareness and alarm about climate, we have to be deceptive.I love it when people are accidentally, publicly honest.
If we are committed to truth and scientific accuracy, we have to talk in hedged, caveat-filled, probabilistic language that is utterly ineffectual in reaching and activating a tuned-out public.” -David Roberts, Grist"
"Automatic, across-the-board defense cuts could cause “substantial pain,” but a tough fiscal era offers opportunities to contractors that have good ideas, a top Air Force leader said Tuesday."Why were they funding contractors who didn't have good ideas in the first place? If they had only funded contractors with good ideas all along, our financial mess wouldn't be as bad.
"President Obama’s green jobs training program, which was part of his stimulus, has failed on most key jobs measures, according to a new internal audit that found it was training workers who already had jobs that didn’t need green energy skills, and was failing to place new enrollees in jobs once they finished the training.
The Labor Department’s inspector general also said grantees who received the green jobs-training money did a poor job of reporting their results.Only 38 percent of those who have completed training got jobs based on it, and only 16 percent kept jobs for at least six months — the key measure of success for the program. …
Of those workers who already had energy-sector jobs, the auditors said they were retrained, even though they didn’t need it."That sounds about normal for government.
"There were AC130U gunships available that could have been on the scene in under an hour. They were not used."I keep saying the US government set up Ambassador Stevens to be killed. I believe this makes the case.
"As at 2 PM Pacific time, here’s the current position of Sandy and the projected path....I'm not surprised that others besides me predicted Sandy would not be a hurricane when it hit land. I showed yesterday that scientific predictions said as much, besides which, the media has cried wolf so many times only a fool wouldn't notice. Yet the weather channel claimed winds were 90 MPG just before 6 PM eastern, just minutes before the storm made landfall. This discrepancy must be accounted for. Here's the report from 5PM eastern:
I had said a couple of days ago, when Sandy was a hurricane, that it would not be a hurricane when it hit the coast. How did that go? Well, as of the time that this location and projection of the path was done, the NDBC has shown all the nearest stations. Not one of the actual observations is showing sustained winds over 50 knots, and that’s a long ways from the 72 knots that marks a hurricane. Please note that the big damage from such storms is the flooding, so I am not minimizing the likely extent of the damage. It will be widespread. However … not a hurricane."
"MAXIMUM SUSTAINED WINDS...90 MPH...150 KM/H"We saw a similar discrepancy with the last media-hyped storm of the century in the Atlantic.
"Though no longer a hurricane, "post-tropical" superstorm Sandy packed a hurricane-sized punch as it slammed into the Jersey Shore on Monday, killing at least 11 people from West Virginia to North Carolina and Connecticut."Rational people must resolve these differences in reporting.
"Thousands are without power already, millions more could go dark. Forecasters predict it could become the worst storm to hit the East Coast in 100 years."If that's accurate, I wonder how the global warming frauds will rationalize that a worse storm hit over a century ago.
"Will Sandy turn political yard signs into projectiles?"Apparently Sandy is so not dangerous that this is the pressing question American want to know. I hate to make fun because Sandy is hurting people, and it will likely kill some, but the media hyped this storm the way it would hype a life-killing meteor impact. Hurricanes happen. They've happened for longer than human history. They are not big news.
"Sandy, one of the biggest storms to hit the United States, pounded the east coast on Tuesday, flooding large parts of New York City, bringing transport to a halt and interrupting the presidential campaign."Of course deaths and people without power are secondary concerns to politics from the point of view of a political propagandists.
""We have not seen the kind of flooding problems that certainly could have happened thus far, but we've still got a long ways to go to get through this storm," Washington Mayor Vincent Gray said on local television."Let's hope they don't happen, but it almost sounds like he's rooting for them.We should create a new term called "storm profiteers". Here's one of the phrases used by storm profiteers, bold mine:
"The storm's wind field stretched from the Canadian border to South Carolina, and from West Virginia to an Atlantic Ocean point about halfway between the United States and Bermuda, easily one of the largest ever seen."Not the largest. In other words, it's normal in the larger scope of things, but Reuters is capitalizing on the storm by pretending it's something abnormal.
"We all know about the term "war profiteering". It's an accurate term for many deplorable businesses, and it's a powerfully activist term for limiting wars.I'm probably not the first to champion this term, but I intend to use it every time these government media propagandists exaggerate storms for their own profit. Then again, maybe I'm the first. I don't see it in a search. Apparently the term hurricane profiteering is already know in political circles as cronyism in the wake of hurricanes.
We should apply that term to storms: storm profiteering. It's an accurate term for the plethora of media outlets which over-hype storms, and it should be a powerful term for limiting that over-hype.
I'm using it. I hope you will too."
"Bill White was rewarded for steering a 2 million dollar contact to BTEC, whos majority owners Bill White was paid by, by being invited to make a $1 million private investment into BTEC that the general public could not make. This investment into BTEC quickly made Bill White a 50 percent profit."It's good work if you can get it.
"...SANDY TURNING TOWARD THE NORTH...EXPECTED TO BRING LIFE-THREATENING STORM SURGE...COASTAL HURRICANE WINDS AND HEAVY APPALACHIAN SNOWS..."What is a life-threatening storm surge in a universe where people can drown in 2 inches of water? Why be so vague?
"Customs and immigration officials refused to comment except to note that "our dual mission is to facilitate travel in the United States while we secure our borders, our people, and our visitors from those that would do us harm like terrorists and terrorist weapons, criminals, and contraband," and added that the burden is on the visitor "to demonstrate that they are admissible" and "the applicant must overcome all grounds of inadmissibility.""That's funny. Government can only impede travel. It cannot facilitate it. And stopping this guy had nothing to do with securing our borders.
"There are several obvious points raised by this episode. Strictly on pragmatic grounds, it seems quite ill-advised to subject the most popular leader in Pakistan - the potential next Prime Minister - to trivial, vindictive humiliations of this sort. It is also a breach of the most basic diplomatic protocol: just imagine the outrage if a US politician were removed from a plane by Pakistani officials in order to be questioned about their publicly expressed political views. And harassing prominent critics of US policy is hardly likely to dilute anti-US animosity; the exact opposite is far more likely to occur."No kidding. Republicans like to talk about Obama's apology tour, but Obama has increased US government arrogance and hostility to foreigners while in office, not decreased it. As if on cue:
"But the most important point here is that Khan's detention is part of a clear trend by the Obama administration to harass and intimidate critics of its drone attacks. As Marcy Wheeler notes, "this is at least the third time this year that the US has delayed or denied entry to the US for Pakistani drone critics.""Nice of Greenwald to point this out.
"...WINDS FORECAST TO BE NEAR HURRICANE FORCE AT LANDFALL..."Storm surge could reach up to 8 feet. Isolated areas could get 12 inches of rain. While this is nothing to take lightly, hurricanes that hit the south are generally produce more rain and higher storm surges. Mountains may get 3 feet of snow, which doesn't happen in the south. The hype for this storm is still way out of proportion with its statistics. And it looks like alarmism has spread from the media to the government, which is no surprise since the two are one and the same anymore, but it's still not good. I get that there's a lot more people in this area than along the Gulf, but that doesn't make the storm more dangerous. Accuweather description describes a run of the mill hurricane despite the hyperventilating warnings. They claim it will hit with the punch of a category 2 hurricane. If you looked back the last 100 years, you'd find dozens of category 2 storms or larger which hit the US. The problem is it's headed right at New York City and New York City and New England are foolishly unprepared for even a run of the mill hurricane.
"What is most curious here is that it was Briffa (in the Climategate emails) who was arguing that some claims about his post 1960 MXD series data as used in other papers might not be valid. It set the stage for “Mikes Nature trick” and “hide the decline“."You do have to wonder if Briffa decided to come clean. If so, good for him.
"I have to wonder if this is some sort of attempt to “come clean” on the issue. Mann must be furious at the timing. There’s no hint of a hockey stick, and no need to splice on the instrumental surface temperature record or play “hide the decline” tricks with this data."
"I suspect there will be a flurry of papers trying to counter this to save Mann’s Hockey Stick."That's because this is the first big crack in the solidarity of the gate keepers: Jones, Mann, Hansen and Briffa are the four I'm aware of. The reason the timing is bad for Mann is Mann recently sued Mark Steyn and National Review. This would seem stupid on his part since he's fighting another suit to keep his taxpayer funded data and email private. The discovery process of this suit will make it impossible to keep those things private. Apparently Mann falsely claimed to be a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize which was actually awarded to the IPCC and Al Gore, not him.
"I’m sure Mark Steyn is thrilled with the prospect of now being able to do additional commentary on this side show. I can’t wait for depositions and discovery."I'm sure he is. Never attack the man with the microphone. Steyn and National Review are going to have a field day with this. If Mann follows through on this, it will probably end his career.
"The mismanagement of the $13 billion program to build the next generation weather satellites was recently described as a 'national embarrassment' by a top official of the Commerce Department."No it's not. It's a government embarrassment. And this is the crack organization promoting global warming.
"Although Sandy is currently a hurricane, it's important not to focus too much on its official category or its precise path. It's a massive system that will affect a huge swath of the East Coast, regardless of exactly where it hits or its precise wind speed."What this tells me is forecasters are expecting winds to fall below hurricane force before it hits land, and since no major hurricanes have hit the US since 2005, the press doesn't want to bother with that pesky hurricane designation. They want people to worry about is what the media says, not any objective measurements.
"Even if Sandy loses strength and makes landfall as something less than a hurricane, the combined storm was expected to bring misery to a huge section of the eastern U.S. An 800-mile wide swath of the country could see 50 mph winds regardless of Sandy's strength."This is more evidence for my contention that forecasters believe Sandy will not be a hurricane when it hits land. 75 mph winds used to be big news, enough to make a storm a hurricane, but because so few hurricanes have hit the US since Katrina, 50 mph winds are the new level for scary. It sounds like this convergence of storms is going to impact a lot of people, but that's no excuse for the irresponsibly alarmist coverage. Pretty soon any time it rains, it's going to be a national story.
"“We did move the path closer to the road across the front of this parcel, as close to the road as is permitted by ODOT. We don’t bend roads around specific parcels unless there is truly a historic property, other severe environmental impacts, or severe economic impacts,” he said."In other words the state does not acknowledge your ownership of your property. Ultimately, it owns all property, and it just generously allows us to buy and sell the right to rent it as long as we use it for a government approved purpose.
"Racial attitudes have not improved in the four years since the United States elected its first black president, an Associated Press poll finds, as a slight majority of Americans now express prejudice toward blacks whether they recognize those feelings or not."This will supposedly cost Obama 5 percent of the vote. What a crock of excrement. Leftists are scrambling to find excuses for the failure of Obama's policies.
"Internet hacking of government networks is nothing new. There have been 603 publicly disclosed cases of breaches of government and military networks since 2005, in which at least 141 million records were stolen, according to The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse Chronology of Data Breaches. "But what about recently?
"Thus far in 2012, there have been 76 government and military network data breaches, in which 9.8 million records were taken. Cyber security and law enforcement experts say the publicly disclosed cases represent only a fraction of the actual number of successful hacks of corporate and government networks."Who would think it's a good idea to turn over internet security to the same people who run Medicare? Government's desire to control the internet comes from its desire to stem freedom of speech.
"But what their role as national leaders demands that they also do is explain that Hurricane Sandy is a true Frankenstorm, a monster created by man tampering with nature with oil, coal, and gas pollution."In the past, pseudo-scientists have backed up this guy's lies:
"This isn’t the first time he has claimed punishment from on high is retribution for not seeing climate issues his way, readers may recall he blamed conservative states for bringing tornadoes upon themselves by not acting on the climate issues he and his fellow propagandist, Joe Romm were pushing at the time. Three scientists, Kevin Trenberth, Michael Mann, and Gavin Schmidt provided quotes to make that exercise in Tabloid Climatology™ complete."Here's a quote from another fraud:
"Perhaps this weather scare that may well be much more than just a scare is God’s revenge for the refusal of the U.S. government to take action on the climate crisis."Anthony Watts responds:
"By extension, Johnson and Glick’s claims are essentially that this Category 1 storm with 75MPH winds is somehow unique to American history, the result of “tampering” with “nature with oil, coal, and gas pollution.” And it hasn’t even made landfall yet. I don’t have to call BS on their idiotic claims, because the facts do it for me."He follows with a long, really long, list of October Hurricanes that made landfall in the US, pretty much all of which have higher winds than Sandy.
""One advocate asserts it would be a 'transformative outcome: saving Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, reanimating the peace process, securing the (Persian) Gulf, sending an unequivocal message to Russia and China, and assuring American ascendancy in the region for a decade to come.'" "It's about power, not security, but frankly I don't see how attacking Iran's nuclear facilities makes the US more powerful in the region. It seems to me it makes us less secure and therefore less powerful. It's going to make Israel less secure, and counterattacks against Israel will weaken Israel too. Over a decade of non-stop war in the Muslim world has cleared weakened the US at home and aboard. I don't see how starting another one can do anything but hurt us.
"And if after months we had smashed Iran as we did Iraq in Desert Storm, would the regime give way to a pro-Western democracy? Or would the result in Iran look like what exists today in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Afghanistan? "Don't forget Egypt and Pakistan. You might at as well add Somalia, Tunisia and Mauritania too. And don't forget the anti-American movements in Morocco, Algeria and Sudan, let alone those in Bahrain, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
"Syria is breaking apart into Sunni and Alawite, Arab, Kurd and Druze, Christian and Muslim, Islamist and secular. Afghanistan is dissolving into Tajik and Uzbek in the north, Hazara in the center, and Pashtun in the south and east. Iraq is losing Kurdistan and reverting to civil-sectarian war.This is one aspect of the decivilizing effect of US aggression on the Middle East, but this never-ending war has had a tremendous decivilizing effect on the US too. Think warrentless wiretaps, TSA, and arresting people for taking pictures of landmarks.
A U.S. defeat of Iran could bring to power revanchists bent on payback through terrorism and propel that half of the population that is Arab, Baluch, Kurd and Azeri to try to break away."
"French Culture Minister Aurelie Filippetti told a parliamentary commission this week that she was in favour of the idea, calling it “a tool that it seems important to me to develop”.Spoken like a true thug. She and her government are the aggressors here, not Google. The government is issuing the threats. This is just flat out robbery. If a given media company can't negotiate a revenue sharing agreement with Google, it deny Google's aggregators access.
She said she was surprised by the tone of Google’s letter.
“You don’t deal with a democratically-elected government with threats,” Filippetti told AFP on Thursday."
"Leading French newspaper publishers last month called on the government to adopt a law imposing a settlement in the long-running dispute with Google, forcing it and other search engines to share some of the advertising revenue from user searches for news contained on media websites."This would be like horse and buggy companies using the government to steal money from those new-fangled automobile companies to subsidize them. These media companies forget the service Google provides them.
"It also noted that Google “redirects four billion ‘clicks’ per month towards the Internet pages” of French media."It's not Google's fault the antique media companies can't make money from this.
"French lawmakers last year ultimately rejected plans for a tax on online advertising revenues, fearing the project would hurt small local companies more than global Internet giants like Google, Facebook or Twitter."At least they got that decision right, but they still want to steal from Google. They're using privacy concerns to further threaten Google into compliance. More info. Google is prepared "to go nuclear on the issue."
"Google says that such a law would "threaten its very existence," according to a letter it sent to several French officials."Google is right. If Google allows this in one country, then every country will do the same and Google will be destroyed in a Tragedy of the Commons situation as each country tries to grab more and more of its revenue compared to the others.
"Such rules "would be very damaging to the internet," Google said in its blog post."But that's good for the government. It hates the internet. It's also good for the antique media companies. They hate the internet. Because there's so much resistance to outright regulation of the internet, this may be he way governments cripple it until they can control it.
"The fighting at the CIA annex went on for more than four hours -- enough time for any planes based in Sigonella Air base, just 480 miles away, to arrive. Fox News has also learned that two separate Tier One Special operations forces were told to wait, among them Delta Force operators."The more we learn, the more it sounds like the ambassador was set up.
"Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told reporters at the Pentagon on Thursday that there was not a clear enough picture of what was occurring on the ground in Benghazi to send help."Baloney. They had an former SEAL turned CIA guy on the ground, and they had two drones in the air above the Benghazi consulate. This cover-up just keeps getting deeper and more obvious.
"Williams contends there is 12 trillion in liquid dollar assets held outside the U.S. Williams says it is only a matter of time before all the Fed money printing will “trigger a sell-off . . . and that will provide the early start of the hyperinflation.” You think the U.S. is better off today than it was in the last meltdown? Not according to Williams, he thinks, “. . . things have gotten a lot worse.”"It's going to be painful.
"Although the overall ratings weren’t quite as strong as last week’s debate ratings — ESPN’s “Monday Night Football” and Game 7 of the National League Championship SeriesThis is probably good news for Romney.on the FOX broadcast network both drew viewers away — the Fox News Channel was able obtain it’s highest rated telecast in the network’s 16-year history with last night’s debate.
Leading all the cables, FNC pulled in nearly 11.5 million viewers, up from its previous high of 11.1 million viewers in last week’s debate and the 2008 vice-presidential debate between then-Delaware Democratic Sen. Joe Biden and then-Alaska Republican Gov. Sarah Palin.
FNC’s 11.5 million was also competitive with its broadcast competition, which was won by NBC with 12.4 million viewers, down from last week’s debate when NBC drew 13.8 million. NBC narrowly edged out ABC’s 11.7 million viewers, followed by CBS in a distant third-place with only 8.4 million."
"So by the time Barack Obama sat down for dinner that night, he knew that Ansar al-Sharia had claimed responsibility for the attack. He knew!I still wonder if this was a setup.
And about that first email … who is the 17th of February militia? Their real name is the 17th of February Martyrs Brigade. Obama likes to talk about outsourcing … the 17th of February Martyrs Brigade are the people whom Obama outsourced for security for our consulate in Benghazi. And who are they? They are an offshoot of Ansar al-Sharia ... the group that was conducting the attack on the consulate!
Are you following this? Obama outsources security to our consulate to the 17th of February Martyrs Brigade, an offshoot of Ansar al-Sharia. And then we know that in the interim Chris Stevens asked for more security and Obama’s State Department says, “You don’t need it. You are fine!” And then the parent group launches an attack, brags about it on Facebook and Twitter, and then by the time Obama had finished dinner, he knew who launched this attack.
What he didn’t know by dinner is where our ambassador and personnel were. So he goes to bed."
"We’ll blame it on this video. It’s all this guy in California … we are going to get him and we’re going to put him in jail and make him the scapegoat. He’ll do a perp walk. We’ll march him up and down the street in handcuffs … “Here he is! Here’s the responsible guy! And don’t you dare have a hearing until after the election. His hearing is scheduled for three days after the election."That's convenient.
"The full story of what happened in Libya, down to the last detail, may never be known. But, as someone once said, you don't need to eat a whole egg to know that it is rotten. And you don't need to know every detail of the events before, during and after the attacks to know that the story put out by the Obama administration was a fraud."Absolutely.
"Sandoval hit three home runs and joined Reggie Jackson, Babe Ruth and Albert Pujols as the only sluggers to do it in the Series, and the Giants jolted Justin Verlander and the Detroit Tigers 8-3 on Wednesday night in Game 1."I can't realistically imagine anything more impressive than that.
"They argue that the strikes have done more harm than good, in fact, by so alienating the local population that drones have "facilitated recruitment to violent non-state armed groups, and motivated further violent attacks."We just need to end this war.
As GlobalPost has discussed in a special series, The Drone Age, US forces favor drones because they reduce and even eliminate danger to American personnel, while supposedly allowing them to target enemies with "surgical precision."
However, the technology isn't flawless. "Human operators peering at grainy video shot by high-flying [unmanned aerial vehicles] have repeatedly mistaken civilians for militants," writes GlobalPost's David Axe. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates that as many as 884 Pakistani civilians were killed by US drones between 2004 and 2012.
Aside from death and injury, the report lists several other ways in which strikes can harm civilians — for example, by damaging property, causing economic hardship, creating sustained fear and stress, and interrupting education when children are taken out of school for fear of being caught in a drone attack.
"[D]rone attacks create widespread devastation," one interviewee told the researchers. "They have killed so many young men, who have left behind helpless young orphans. We cannot figure out when a drone will strike — they may strike in two days, three days, ten days, or a month — but they are always there.""
"The 'annexe' to the U.S. consulate in Benghazi which was attacked by militants last month was a CIA building, it has been revealed.But we still don't know why US forces didn't mount a rescue or at least provide air support.
The intelligence base, which has previously been described only as a 'safe house', was the building which two Navy SEALs were defending when they died in the terrorist raid.
It was around a mile from the consulate where ambassador Chris Stevens and diplomat Sean Smith were killed on the night of September 11."
"It is unclear exactly how many CIA operatives were stationed at the base, but officials said that two aircraft were required to lift all agents and diplomats out of Benghazi.I'm telling you, there is more to this than meets the eye. For example:
Two weeks ago, officials from the State Department speaking at a congressional hearing exhibited a map of Benghazi with the CIA station marked on it, but were asked to remove the map."
"On Saturday, Gary Berntsen told CBS News that U.S. military officials had been able to watch the attack through unmanned aerial drones in the sky above Benghazi, and criticised them for being too slow to respond.But this is inconsistent with claims the battle raged for hours. This is sounds like a cover-up too, people being thrown under the bus. Somebody chose to let these people die, almost as if they were set up to be killed. If the complex housed so many agents and diplomats it took two aircraft to carry them all, where were they? Why was the ambassador in Benghazi instead of at the embassy in Tripoli?
'They stood, and they watched, and our people died,' he said.
Defense Department officials considered sending troops in to rescue the ambassador and staff, but ultimately decided not to."
"On August 2, six weeks before Stevens was killed, he requested 'protective detail bodyguard' positions, calling the security situation in Libya 'unpredictable, volatile and violent.'Did the US assassinate him? Some scenario like this would explain why Romney refused to go after Obama about Benghazi given that was the first question of tonight's debate. Somebody briefed Romney about what really was going on and told him to shut up about it. With every new piece of information that comes out, this smells worse and worse.
A month earlier, he requested that the State Department extend his tour of duty personnel, which is a 16-man temporary security team trained in combating terrorism. The request was denied and the security team left on August 8.
Stevens had asked for the security team to stay through mid-September.
Colonel Andrew Wood, the leader of the security team that left Libya in the weeks before the terror attack, told CBS News that Stevens fought hard against losing the team.
'It was quite a degree of frustration on their part,' he said. 'They were - I guess you could say - clenched-fist over the whole issue.
The White House maintained publicly for a week that the attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya was a spontaneous mob upset about an anti-Islam video, even though it has now been revealed that they were informed within 24 hours of the attack that it was planned and carried out by militants."
"According to Jeff Sessions, the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, means-tested welfare programs soared to over $1 trillion last year. The federal government accounted for $750 billion of that, while $250 billion came from the states, which leveraged federal payments into even larger expenses."But just like Obama's debt hasn't created jobs, I doubt this will buy him nearly as many votes as he hopes.
"Tonight, America was introduced to Peacenik Mitt — and watched him take a pummeling. I don’t know how much this will impact the overall dynamic of the race — it may not matter much at all — but it’s hard to see this as a good night for Romney."These two statements are inconsistent. It's not possible that one guy pummeled another when they both took all the same positions. I think Romney was trying to appeal to women by being even keel while allowing Obama to look aggressive. It think it was his strategy.
"Oddly, Romney again and again supported Obama's positions, at one point basically acknowledging that Obama had made it clear that the United States has Israel’s back. "
"In 1923 Germany experienced one of the world's worst cases of hyperinflation and the worst ever for an industrialized nation. The reichsmark was destroyed by its own central bank, plunging the German people into misery and desperation. Now, after only a dozen years of relative monetary discipline, the euro faces the same fate as country after country demands to be bailed out of its mounting debts by unlimited printing of money by the ECB. Because Germany is part of the EMU, it must accept these newly printed euros. This threatened monetary inflation of unlimited amounts has shaken German bankers to the core. It is the nightmare scenario that they feared when, against their better judgment, the German politicians agreed to give up their beloved deutsche mark and place the economic fate of the nation in the hands of a committee of foreigners not as concerned about monetary inflation. But Germany can put a stop to this destruction and save the world while it saves itself. It can leave the EMU, reinstate the deutsche mark, and tie it to gold."
"By leaving the EMU Germany would insulate itself from the consequences of the euro as a tragedy of the commons; i.e., monetary inflation by third parties would end, Germany would not experience higher prices due to the actions of third parties, and the capital-destroying transfers of wealth would end.I love this idea. This is the way to stop any more damage from being done. Obviously the US should immediately tie the dollar back to gold, but that's not going to happen. Germany might be our best hope.
Yet Germany should go one step further. It should anchor the DM to gold. Germany is the world's fourth-largest economy, behind only the United States, China, and Japan. Furthermore, Germany owns more of the world's gold than any other entity except the United States, more than either China or Japan and more than any other European country. A prerequisite to market acceptance of any gold money would be confidence in the integrity of the sponsoring institution. Not only is the Bundesbank known for its integrity and reverence for stable money; Germany itself has a worldwide reputation for the rule of law, advanced financial architecture, and a stable political system. For these reasons, Germany would prove to the world that a gold-backed money is not only possible but desirable. Expect a cascade of similar pronouncements once Germany's trading partners realize the importance of settling international financial transactions in the best money available — which initially at least would be a golden DM."
"As many analysts and officials have explained, Dodd-Frank subsidizes large, influential Wall Street financial institutions, while imposing disproportionately heavy burdens on Main Street banks and the communities they serve. Even if we take President Obama, Senator Dodd, Representative Frank, and the rest of Dodd-Frank’s supporters at face value when they protest that they actually intended to rein in Wall Street banks, the laws they passed accomplish the opposite result. Intentional or not, a kiss is still a kiss."Please. Have we forgotten how corrupt Chris Dodd and Barney Frank were? These regulations were designed to benefit the giant banks, and they do. And let's not forget the big banks gave Obama more money than anybody else in 2008. As opensecrets.org shows, It's a myth that the big banks support Republicans more than Democrats, though in this election they support Romney over Obama.
"Journalists, politicians and economists all seem to agree that the biggest economic issue currently worrying voters is unemployment. It follows then that most believe that the deciding factor in the presidential race will be the ability of each candidate to convince the public that his policies will create jobs. It seems that everyone got this memo...except the voters.Funny how inflation is never mentioned as a problem.
According to the results of a Fox News poll released last week (a random telephone sample of more than 1,200 registered voters), 41% identified "inflation" as "the biggest economic problem they faced." This is nearly double the 24% that named "unemployment" as their chief concern. For further comparison, 19% identified "taxes" and 7% "the housing market" as their primary concern. A full 44% of women, who often do more of the household shopping and would therefore be more sensitive to prices changes, identified rising prices as their primary concern."
