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Executive Tyranny

Alan Caruba
Facts Not Fantasy Blogspot
Sat, 07 Jul 2012 23:04 UTC
General Obama
© FactsNotFantasy Blogspot
The use of Executive Orders (EO) goes back to the first President, George Washington. Every chief executive has issued them since then. Some have been historic, but the latest Executive Orders of President Obama are downright scary.

The Executive Order signed on June 25 is titled "Russian Highly Enriched Uranium" and offers as its justification the fact that "the accumulation of a large volume of weapons-usable fissile material in the territory of the Russian Federal continues to constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States, and hereby declare a national emergency to deal with that threat."

A national emergency? Over Russian nuclear material?

Are we still in the Cold War?

Are we facing another Cuban Missile Crisis?

Are the Russians getting ready to launch a nuclear attack on the U.S.?

Are the Russians provocateurs? Yes, but what else is new?

The justification for this Executive Order is absurd.

The world is filled with nuclear weapons held by both our allies and our presumed enemies.

Having proclaimed a national emergency, why hasn't Obama gone on television to inform Americans? Because, like everything else he does, it is done with stealth.
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Footprints

French President Hollande vows new Armenia 'genocide law'


BBC
Sun, 08 Jul 2012 18:17 UTC
Image
© AFP
Armenians say up to 1.5m people were killed by the Ottoman Turks in 1915-16.
French President Francois Hollande has said he plans a new law to punish denial that the 1915-16 killing of Armenians was genocide. A previous law approved by the French parliament was struck down in February by the Constitutional Council, which said it infringed freedom of speech.

Turkey rejects the term "genocide" for the deaths of Armenians during their deportation by the Ottoman Empire. The issue has strained Franco-Turkish relations in recent years.

Mr Hollande's predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy had also ordered his government to draft a new law after the old one was struck down. "Francois Hollande has again expressed his willingness to propose a bill designed to curb the denial of the Armenian genocide, as he had said during his campaign and even before," the Coordinating Council of Armenian Organisations of France (CCAF) told the AFP news agency.

A delegation from the CCAF will meet Mr Hollande before the end of the month to discuss what form the new law would take, French media reports say.

On Thursday, remarks by French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius during a meeting with his Turkish counterpart appeared to indicate that the Constitutional Council's ruling would make it impossible to take up the issue again. However, Mr Hollande's office said on Saturday: "The president expressed his commitments during the campaign. He will keep them.

"We must find a path, a road that allows for a text that is consistent with the constitution."
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Footprints

Numbers Tell of Failure in Drug War

Eduardo Porter
New York Times
Sun, 08 Jul 2012 17:52 UTC
When policy makers in Washington worry about Mexico these days, they think in terms of a handful of numbers: Mexico's 19,500 hectares devoted to poppy cultivation for heroin; its 17,500 hectares growing cannabis; the 95 percent of American cocaine imports brought by Mexican cartels through Mexico and Central America.

They are thinking about the wrong numbers. If there is one number that embodies the seemingly intractable challenge imposed by the illegal drug trade on the relationship between the United States and Mexico, it is $177.26. That is the retail price, according to Drug Enforcement Administration data, of one gram of pure cocaine from your typical local pusher. That is 74 percent cheaper than it was 30 years ago.

This number contains pretty much all you need to evaluate the Mexican and American governments' "war" to eradicate illegal drugs from the streets of the United States. They would do well to heed its message. What it says is that the struggle on which they have spent billions of dollars and lost tens of thousands of lives over the last four decades has failed.

There is little reason to expect the elections this year will do much to address the challenges to the bilateral relationship. Enrique Peña Nieto, elected president of Mexico on Sunday, is a scion of Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party, which was tainted by authoritarianism, corruption and fraud during seven decades in power, before it was booted out by voters 12 years ago. In the United States, neither President Obama nor his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, has shown much interest in the nation's southern neighbor.
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Propaganda

Propaganda Alert! Al-Qaeda terror suspect caught at Olympic Park

David Barrett
The Telegraph
Sun, 08 Jul 2012 16:30 UTC
London Overland Train
© Real World Image
The 'alleged' 'suspect' is guilty of travelling by train to seek legal advice at the request of his lawyers. (The train travels near to an Olympic venue)
The alleged al-Qaeda militant was caught crossing through the Olympic Park five times, breaking a ban imposed by the Home Secretary, The Sunday Telegraph has learned.

The 24 year-old has previously tried to get to Afghanistan, allegedly for terrorist training, and is suspected of fighting for the Somali Islamist group al Shabaab, which has been responsible for thousands of deaths, including those of Western aid workers. He is accused of trying to recruit other Britons to its cause.

A Home Office lawyer warned after his discovery in the Olympic area that the man - known as CF - wanted to "re-engage in terrorism-related activities, either in the UK or Somalia" and is "determined to continue to adhere to his Islamist extremist agenda".

His detention is the most serious security alert yet to hit the Olympic Park.

It is disclosed today after a week which saw 14 terror-related arrests across Britain, including a white Muslim convert detained over an alleged plan to carry out a major terrorist attack.

Comment: The headline 'Man travels on same rail route a few times over a couple of months at request of Lawyer" doesn't quite have the same attention-grabbing detail to it. This is in essense all he has actually done and the article is pure nonsense. Just look at how many times the words 'suspect', 'alleged', 'was possibly', 'claims', 'says' is framed around complete fiction. All in all a wonderfully written piece of propaganada with a highlight of presenting the new crime of the century: 'acting suspiciously in a dinghy'!

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Bomb

6 NATO troops killed in Afghanistan


NBC News
Sun, 08 Jul 2012 14:00 UTC
Image
© Unknown
Results of an IED. 2 anti tank mines stacked.
Six NATO troops were killed in a bomb attack in eastern Afghanistan on Sunday, the military alliance said, on a day where a total of 29 people died from roadside bombs and insurgent attacks.

The identities and nationalities of the NATO victims were withheld and details of the attack were not immediately available.

The deaths take the number of NATO troops killed in the last two days to eight, one of the deadliest periods of violence for foreign troops in weeks.

In addition to the six NATO deaths, bombs and attacks killed 16 Afghan civilians, five policemen and two members of the U.S.-led coalition in southern Afghanistan, Afghan and NATO authorities said.

Comment: The closing line seems misleading. Was Afghanistan a hyper-chaotic nation before the United States and other Western Governments began destroying it? War is Chaos and Terror.

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Cell Phone

Phone Bill Follies and Obamacare


The Burning Platform
Sun, 08 Jul 2012 14:49 UTC
Phone
© codinghorror.com
We have a land line phone in our condo. We have it because we rent it out during the summer and thought we should have it in case renters need it. We contracted with Verizon 8 years ago for the minimal local service. The charge was $18 per month.

I just paid the monthly bill today and it was $27.08. That's a 50% increase in 8 years. I don't have better service. I don't have more bells and whistles. What could possibly have resulted in this increase?

My actual charge from Verizon for the service is only $16.45. Here is the detail for the rest of the bill:

Federal Subscriber Line Charge - $6.29

Federal Universal Service Fee - $1.09

NJ Sales Tax - $1.67

911 System/Emerg Resp Fee - $0.90

Federal Excise Tax - $0.68

A full 39% of my bill is for government taxes and fees. I don't know if Verizon is calling things Federal to mislead people, or whether these surcharges are required by the Federal government. Who knows? I'm either being screwed by a Mega-Government or a Mega-Corporation.
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Bad Guys

David Seaton: Ayn Rand's India holds up a mirror for the American right to see itself

David Seaton
David Seaton's News Links
Sun, 08 Jul 2012 11:33 UTC
"Evil requires the sanction of the victim." Ayn Rand"
Ayn Rand
© unknown
Ayn Rand (R)
The other day in my perusings I stumbled upon this troubling jewel:
Not only do Indians perform more Google searches for (Ayn) Rand than citizens of any country in the world except the United States, but Penguin Books India has sold an impressive number of copies -- as many as 50,000 of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead each since 2005, a number comparable to sales there by global best-seller John Grisham. And that's not counting the ubiquitous pirated copies of her works that are hawked at rickety street stalls, sidewalk piles, and bus stations -- an honor that Rand, a fierce defender of intellectual property rights, probably would not have appreciated. Foreign Policy
To put this information into some perspective I would ask you to read a paragraph from Wikipedia:
The World Bank estimates that 456 million Indians (42% of the total Indian population) now live under the global poverty line of $1.25 per day (PPP). This means that a third of the global poor now reside in India.(...) India has a higher rate of malnutrition among children under the age of three (46% in year 2007) than any other country in the world.
Now into that context, to see what Indians are so eagerly googling, let's mix in the following sayings of Ayn Rand, which though few, hopefully give the full flavor of her "Objectivist" philosophy:
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War Whore

Patrick Buchanan: Iran Derangement Syndrome

Patrick J. Buchanan
Information Clearing House
Fri, 06 Jul 2012 11:14 UTC
Iran is not seeking to have the atomic bomb, possession of which is pointless, dangerous and is a great sin from an intellectual and a religious point of view."

Thus did supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declare in February that Iran's possession of atomic weapons would be a mortal sin against Allah.

Iran

Iran
It is also the unanimous judgment of the U.S. intelligence community, declared in 2007 and affirmed in 2011, that Iran has abandoned any program to build nuclear weapons.

Is the Ayatollah lying? Is the entire U.S. intel community wrong?

Iran's plants, at Natanz, where uranium is enriched to 5 percent, and at Fordow, where it is enriched to 20 percent - both below weapons grade - are under constant U.N. monitoring. Iran has offered to surrender its 20 percent uranium and cease enriching to that level, if the West will provide isotopes for its nuclear medicine and lift some of the more onerous sanctions.

No deal, says the United States. Iran must give up enrichment entirely and indefinitely.
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Bizarro Earth

Greek Opposition Leader Says Government Won't Last


The Associated Press
Sat, 07 Jul 2012 00:00 UTC
Alexis Tsipras
© unknown
Alexis Tsipras
The leader of Greece's main opposition party has accused the country's three-party coalition government of wanting to sell Greece's resources and public companies on the cheap.

Alexis Tsipras, head of the Coalition of the Radical Left party, known as Syriza, told Parliament Saturday he was especially warning those who want to "grab state property on the cheap." He warned would-be buyers of state property that they might lose all their money and face criminal proceedings.

Tsipras proposes a moratorium on the payment of Greece's debt until the country, mired in a deep recession, returns to growth. He predicts his party will soon come to power because the coalition government will fail.

The newly-elected Parliament will stage a vote of confidence on the government at midnight on Sunday.
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Dollar

Is Barclays LIBOR Corruption a Phony Ploy to Strengthen the Bloomberg/Qatar QIBOR?


The Daily Bell
Sun, 08 Jul 2012 02:26 UTC
evil banker
© n/a
Barclays Libor fix trail leads to senior managers ... Senior Barclays managers were worried over negative headlines during the financial crisis and contributed to a culture that fixed key funding rates artificially low, U.S. and UK regulators said in reaching a settlement with the bank. The findings based on internal emails and other communications raise questions about how high up the Barclays management chain came instructions to submit lower rates, and who knew about the rate rigging. - Reuters

Dominant Social Theme: The corruption of these Western banks is terminal!

Free-Market Analysis: So Barclays resides at the "heart of darkness" which is LIBOR - various rates at which banks and the rest of can borrow. Something isn't quite right about this.

Bloomberg is busy setting up QIBOR in Qatar, and the putative explanation is that there is too much corruption in London. Now we have an example of corruption! Convenient? Right on time ...

QIBOR is just like LIBOR and those involved will "set" the rate at which banks borrow after conversing with banks themselves. This is a US$ 90 trillion market and thus the movement of this facility from London to Qatar is no small event.

If one were interested in moving such a large market, charges of corruption would surely be helpful. And lo and behold, we are reading about them everywhere.

What is the big deal about financial corruption? It is simply a fact that the world's modern central banking is shot through with corruption. How could it be otherwise? It begins with central banks that fix the price of money and its volume and continues from there.
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