Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Syria

It's a Syrian thing, you wouldn't understand

unless you've been in the White House situation room. At least that's what Obama is saying.

I disagree.

Obama wanted to fundamentally transform the Middle East in to some sort vision he created for himself as a child in Indonesia that was not based on fundamental understanding of Islam. As a result, Obama supported the overthrow of dictatorial governments suchs as Egypt and Libya with the obvious outcome that these governments would be replaced with even more radical governments. Now the economies of Egypt and Libya are collapsing and civil rights have disappeared.

Obama supported the overthrow of Syria as well. Now he has awoke to the reality that with Assad gone, extremists and Sharia law would follow. Devout Muslims, intent on overthrowing Israel but now armed with chemical weapons and new modern weapons shipped from the US and its allies. The only option would be to invade like we did in Iraq and install a puppet government. That will never happen. Likewise, the US can't supply enough military support to defeat the combined efforts of Russia, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Al Qaeda, the Taliban and Hezbollah.

So how does Obama save face? Every red line he draws gets crossed. People do not respect or fear the United States anymore, Obama appears to them to be a paper tiger. Launching a hellfire missile every once in a while in Pakistan is no longer enough to instill fear amongst our enemies. The only thing Obama can do is provide a token amount of arms and support until the rebels are defeated. The outcome is assured. Assad will be victorious. The Middle East becomes even more destabilized. Also, this will be a PR victory for Putin.

Now how long will it be before Iran announces it has joined the atomic age?

Monday, June 17, 2013

What Do Sociopaths Deserve

Ind. woman condemned for killing at 15 is freed

By CHARLES WILSON | Associated Press – 2 hrs 13 mins ago

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — A woman who was sentenced to death at age 16 after she confessed to her part in the torture and murder of a 78-year-old bible studies teacher has been released from an Indiana prison after spending a quarter century behind bars.

Paula Cooper, whose death sentence in 1986 enraged human rights activists and drew a plea for clemency from Pope John Paul II, left the state prison quietly in a state vehicle and wearing donated clothing, Department of Correction spokesman Doug Garrison said.

The prison, about 60 miles west of Indianapolis, gave the now-43-year-old woman $75 to help her make a fresh start.

When asked where Cooper was being taken, Garrison said, "We have something arranged but that's not something I can talk about."

Cooper was 15 years old when she used a butcher's knife to cut Ruth Pelke 33 times during a robbery in Gary that ended in Pelke's death. Her three companions received lighter sentences but Cooper confessed to the killing and in 1986, at age 16, she became the youngest person on death row in the country.

Shortly after, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the execution of young people who were under 16 at the time they committed an offense could not be sentenced to death, saying it counted as cruel and unusual punishment and was thus unconstitutional. Indiana legislators then passed a state law raising the minimum age limit for execution from 10 years to 16, and in 1988, the state's high court set Cooper's death sentence aside and ordered her to serve 60 years in prison.

In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional to execute anyone who is younger than 18 years when they commit an offense.

Cooper's sentence was reduced due to her behavior in prison, where she earned a bachelor's degree. She will remain on parole for a few years, Garrison said.

"We're just wanting her to be successful, that's all," he said. "She needs to get back to living."

Her neighbourhood was bombed by the allies, the Jews around the corner were being sent to Auschwitz and the Red Army had launched its final assault on Berlin. But Brigitte Eicke, a teenaged German, was unconcerned. She was far more interested in going to the cinema, dancing to gramophone records and trying to cope with a "disastrous" perm.

The 15-year-old Berlin schoolgirl, nicknamed "Gitti", started keeping a diary in December 1942, when the German capital was being bombed nightly and the Nazi Holocaust was killing thousands. As a trainee secretary, she recorded her daily experiences to improve her stenography skills.

Now, some 70 years on, her diary has been published for the first time in Germany and is being hailed as remarkable documentary evidence of how millions of Germans relied on collective indifference to endure the horrors of war and ignore the brutality of the Nazi rule.

Entitled Backfisch im Bombenkrieg (teenaged girl in bombing war), Eicke's diary is an often banal account of everyday life. She started writing it just months before Anne Frank began her diary, but the contents could hardly be more different.

"Gitti is merely a cog in the wheels that kept Nazi Germany turning," is how Der Spiegel magazine described the author last week. "She is a young woman skilled in the art of blotting out ugliness, willing to believe what she's told and, ultimately, one of the lucky ones," it added.

Here is Gitti's entry for 1 February 1944: "The school had been bombed when we arrived this morning. Waltraud, Melitta and I went back to Gisela's and danced to gramophone records." In another raid on her Berlin neighbourhood in March 1943, two people are killed, 34 are injured and more than 1,000 are made homeless. Gitti writes: "It took place in the middle of the night, horrible, I was half asleep".

In November 1944, Hitler is trying to cripple the advances made after the D-Day landings by planning an offensive in the Ardennes, but Gitti – by now a member of the Nazi Party – is more concerned about her hairdo. She writes that she has just been given a "disastrous" perm by her hairdresser and is worried about going to work "looking a fright".

Then on 2 March 1945, while Hitler's troops are trying to halt the Red Army's advance just 60 miles east of Berlin, Gitti, now 18, goes to the cinema. She writes: "Margot and I went to the Admiralspalast cinema to see Meine Herren Söhne. It was such a lovely film, but there was a power cut in the middle. How annoying!"

The humdrum tone is all the more disquieting when it comes to the steady disappearance of Berlin's Jews – an issue that receives only one mention in the entire diary. On 27 February 1943, she ends a trivia-packed account about how she and her friend Waltraud go to the opera and get chatted up by soldiers on the way home with the entry: "Jews all over town being taken away, including the tailor across the road."

Brigitte Eicke is now 86. She still lives in east Berlin's Prenzlauerberg district, where she lived during the war. Just around the corner from where she worked as a secretary, there was a "collection centre" for Jews who were being sent to the Auschwitz death camp.

In a recent interview to coincide with the publication of her diary, she said: "My son always said to me: how could you be so oblivious? But I never saw a thing." She added: "There were some Jewish girls in my first class photograph taken in 1933 but, by the time the next one was taken, they were all gone. When I asked my mother about them, she said they had moved to Palestine."

Decades would pass before she grasped the enormity of the Nazis' crimes. "It was only when I visited Buchenwald in 1970 that I saw photographs of the camps. It took me years to realise what had gone on," she said.

Unlike thousands of young German women, Brigitte Eicke appears to have escaped being raped by Red Army troops when they took Berlin. But she lost her father and an uncle on the eastern front. Some German commentators have suggested that her naive and apolitical account of her experiences was an unconscious survival attempt.

"We just muddled through, we had no choice," is how she describes it.

Sunday, June 16, 2013

Bernanke to Princeton Grads. Meritocracy is unfair. rich people just lucky.

Nothing about hard work.

“A meritocracy,” Bernanke said, “is a system in which the people who are the luckiest in their health and genetic endowment; luckiest in terms of family support, encouragement and, probably, income; luckiest in their educational and career opportunities; and luckiest in so many other ways difficult to enumerate — these are the folks who reap the largest rewards.”

What’s the solution to that natural imbalance? Bernanke explained: “The only way for even a putative meritocracy to hope to pass ethical muster, to be considered fair, is if those who are the luckiest in all of those respects also have the greatest responsibility to work hard, to contribute to the betterment of the world and to share their luck with others.”

Friday, June 14, 2013

Patriot

Amerika

'Rampant Injustice': The IRS And DOJ Raid Small Businesses With Paramilitary, Gestapo Style Tactics

by DEBRA HEINE 12 Jun 2013

A short documentary by Jan Morgan ofJanMorganMedia, called "Rampant Injustice" exposes the federal abuse of power that has taken place since Obama was elected. This underexposed video documents the egregious trampling of the Constitutional rights of Americans during white collar crime investigations by the Department of Justice and the Criminal Investigation Division of the Internal Revenue Service.

Between 2009 and 2011, IRS audits against small businesses increased 32%. Federal warrants against businesses have also increased substantially with many of the raids conducted by SWAT teams.

Among the hundreds of businesses raided by the IRS and Department of Justice, using paramilitary, gestapo like tactics, was Mountain Pure Water Bottling Company and Duncan Outdoors, Inc., both situated in Arkansas and Gibson Guitar located in Tennessee. Their stories are profiled in the documentary which has been up on YouTube since October 31 of last year. The abusive targeting practices of the IRS toward conservative organizations have finally made the news, but these stories need exposure too.

The IRS and DOJ are out of control, and have been at war against small businesses.

At 8:00 a.m. on January 18, 2012, 40 -50 heavily armed, hostile government agents raided Mountain Pure water, scaring the dickens out of everyone in the building.

What you're about to see is a reenactment of something that really happened. The owner, John Stacks told me on the phone that it was even worse than depicted in the video. He says he was cursed at, spat on, and bullied in such an egregious fashion, he felt like they were trying to provoke him to react violently. His son, Court Stacks, the General Manager, had a loaded gun pointed to his face. His seven and a half month pregnant wife watched news coverage of the raid at home in horror. She would later lose the baby.

"I am not a militant", Jerry Miller the Comptroller of Mountain Pure Water said. "They've thrown the Constitution away!"

John Stacks (a Republican) and his son Ryan, an attorney, were not allowed to enter the building. Why? According to Miller, one of the agents told him, "we're the federal government and we can do anything we want to."

"They threw our liberties out the window", Miller concluded. "They treated us like third class citizens...if people are not outraged, they need to be. This used to be America - now it's not."

"I never fathomed that something to this extent could take place in the United States", said Ryan Stacks. He went on to say they were being treated similarly to "some type of terrorists, essentially."

Duncan Outdoors faced a similar gestapo like raid with the eerily familiar refrain from one of the officers, "we're from the IRS and we can do anything we want."

John Stacks told me he lost business over the episode, because people generally think you've done something wrong when you get raided by the feds. Stacks' "crime" stems from financial records being sought regarding a FEMA loan he got after a tornado destroyed one of his properties in May of 2008. The harassment started about a year and a half later, he said, on a loan he's never been late in paying.

“This documentary is not about the guilt or innocence of the citizens involved", said Jan Morgan, an Investigative TV Journalist and Conservative Columnist said at the end of the video. "It is about the increasing number of unconstitutional, paramilitary, gestapo style raid tactics involving two agencies of the federal government.”

*Clarification: It was an SBA loan he secured through FEMA to recover the tornado losses to his home, warehouse, and associated equipment.

Mr. Stacks told James Simpson of AIM that the SBA "apparently doesn’t believe that assets listed as damaged in the storm were actually damaged."

Thursday, June 13, 2013

The Obama administration is considering resettling thousands of refugees who left Syria

The Obama administration is considering resettling thousands of refugees who left Syria during the country's ongoing civil war to multiple towns and cities across the United States, the L.A. Times reports.

A resettlement plan under discussion in Washington and other capitals is aimed at relieving pressure on Middle Eastern countries straining to support 1.6 million refugees, as well as assisting hard-hit Syrian families.

The State Department is "ready to consider the idea," an official from the department said, if the administration receives a formal request from the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees, which is the usual procedure.

The United States usually accepts about half the refugees that the U.N. agency proposes for resettlement. California has historically taken the largest share, but Illinois, Florida, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia are also popular destinations.

U.N. refugee officials, along with diplomats and non-governmental relief groups, are scheduled to meet in Geneva this week to discuss potential resettlement plans. Germany has already agreed to take 5,000 refugees.

"It was probably inevitable that in this crisis, with these overwhelming numbers, governments would start moving in this direction," Lavinia Limon, chief executive officer of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, a Virginia-based advocacy and service group, told the L.A. Times. Limon added, "But there will be resistance."

Congress is unlikely to warm up to the idea of agreeing to resettle thousands of Syrian refugees into the U.S. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who are currently pushing immigration reform bills, particularly aimed at Latinos who are in the country illegally, will need to explain why they may favor or oppose resettling thousands of Syrian refugees.

It should be noted that Congress resisted accepting Iraqi refugees in 2003 following the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Between 1983 and 2009, the U.S. resettled a total of 76,205 Iraqis. Meanwhile, seventy percent of total refugees in the U.S. were on food stamps in 2009. Within that number, 95 percent of Iraqi refugees were food stamp recipients. Additionally, the report shows an unemployment rate of 46 percent in 2009 among Iraqi refugees. A total of 219 Syrian refugees were resettled in the U.S. between 1983 and 2009.

More importantly, President Obama's administration supports Syrians who are attempting to oust Syrian President Bashar Assad, but the emergence of Islamic extremist groups with ties to al Qaeda among the Syrian opposition presents a serious security concern. TheL.A. Times alludes to the potential danger with such a resettlement:

Homeland security officials require careful vetting of refugees, with multiple interviews and background checks before they are allowed to enter the country. Under normal circumstances, the screening process can take a year or longer.

U.S. officials are likely to be extra careful with Syrian refugees. As Islamic militants take a more prominent role in the rebel forces, officials worry about fighters with Al Qaeda ties trying to enter the country. Two resettled Iraqis were convicted of trying to send arms to Al Qaeda from their home in Bowling Green, Ky.

New National Security Advisor Susan Rice and President Obama's nominee for U.N. ambassador Samantha Power are both refugee advocates and will likely push for the resettlement.

Just what Obama needed, to distract us, attack Syria

The "red-line" has been crossed.The New York Times is reporting that:

U.S. CONCLUDES SYRIA USED CHEMICAL WEAPONS AGAINST REBELS: NYT, and
NYT SAYS EUROPEAN OFFICIALS REACH SAME CONCLUSION ON SYRIA
MCCAIN SAYS U.S. TO PROVIDE WEAPONS TO SYRIAN REBELS

And along side that finding, as part of (or justification for?) the arming of the Syrian rebels, the WSJ reports that theUS Military is calling for a limited no-fly zone inside Syria. The seriousness of this escalation must be put in the context of a desperately-needed distraction for the current administration - which makes the decisions being made even more concerning in their potential for extremes.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-06-13/us-propose-no-fly-zone-over-syria-concludes-use-chemical-weapons-against-rebels

Well Obama can breath a sigh of relief, he can get his rotting image a short break so the MSM can demand WAR!

Obama ‘Strongly Objects’ to Religious Liberty Amendment

The Obama Administration “strongly objects” to a proposed amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act on Wednesday that would have protected the religious rights of soldiers – including evangelical Christian service members who are facing growing hostility towards their religion.

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The amendment was authored by Rep. John Fleming, R-La. It would have “required the Armed Forces to accommodate ‘actions and speech’ reflecting the conscience, moral, principles or religious beliefs of the member.”

The Obama Administration said the amendment would have a “significant adverse effect on good order, discipline, morale, and mission accomplishment.”

“With its statement, the White House is now endorsing military reprimands of members who keep a Bible on their desk or express a religious belief,” Fleming told Fox News. “This administration is aggressively hostile towards religious beliefs that it deems to be politically incorrect.”

Fleming introduced the amendment after a series of high-profile incidents involving attacks on religious liberty within the military- including an Air Force officer who was told to remove a Bible from his desk because it might give the impression he was endorsing a religion.

He said there are other reports of Christian service members and chaplains being punished for their faith.

The Air Force censored a video created by a chaplain because it include the word “God.” The Air Force feared the word might offend Muslims and atheists.
A service member received a “severe and possibly career-ending reprimand” for expressing his faith’s religious position about homosexuality in a personal religious blog.
A senior military official at Fort Campbell sent out a lengthy email officially instructing officers to recognize “the religious right in America” as a “domestic hate group” akin to the KKK and Neo-Nazis because of its opposition to homosexual behavior.
A chaplain was relieved of his command over a military chapel because, consistent with DOMA’s definition of marriage, he could not allow same-sex weddings to take place in the chapel.

Last month Coast Guard Rear Admiral William Lee told a National Day of Prayer audience that religious liberty was being threatened by Pentagon lawyers and service members are being told to hide their faith in Christ.

“Leaders like myself are feeling the constraints of rules and regulations and guidance issued by lawyers that put us in a tighter and tighter box regarding our constitutional right to express our religious faith,” he said.

Fleming said the purpose of his amendment is to clarify ambiguities in the Pentagon’s policies.

“The bottom line is the military is bending over backwards to remove – even in the case of chaplains – expressions of faith and conscience,” Fleming said.

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, called the Obama Administration’s edict a “chilling suppression of religious freedom.”

“The Obama administration has joined forces with those who are attacking the religious freedoms of those who serve in our Armed Services,” Perkins said. “The Administration’s opposition to Rep. Fleming’s religious freedom amendment reveals that this administration has gone beyond accommodating the anti-Christian activists who want to remove any vestige of Christianity from the military, to aiding them by blocking this bipartisan measure.”

I Guess Some Would Call This.... "Leading By Example"

Census: White majority in U.S. gone by 2043

By Hope Yen, Associated Press

For the first time, America's racial and ethnic minorities now make up about half of the under-5 age group, the government said Thursday. It's a historic shift that shows how young people are at the forefront of sweeping changes by race and class.
The new census estimates, a snapshot of the U.S. population as of July 2012, comes a year after the Census Bureau reported that whites had fallen to a minority among babies. Fueled by immigration and high rates of birth, particularly among Hispanics, racial and ethnic minorities are now growing more rapidly in numbers than whites.
It’s the latest in a series of reports that have signaled a major, long-term shift in the demographics of the United States, as non-Hispanic white Americans are expected to become a minority group over the next three decades. For years, Americans of Asian, black and Hispanic descent have stood poised to topple the demographic hegemony historically held by whites.

Based on current rates of growth, whites in the under-5 group are expected to tip to a minority this year or next, Thomas Mesenbourg, the Census Bureau's acting director, said.
The government also projects that in five years, minorities will make up more than half of children under 18. Not long after, the total U.S. white population will begin an inexorable decline in absolute numbers, due to aging baby boomers.
The latest census numbers show:

The population younger than 5 stood at 49.9 percent minority in 2012.
For the first time in more than a century, the number of deaths now exceeds births among white Americans. This "natural decrease" occurred several years before the government's original projection, a sign of the white population decline soon to arrive. For now, the white population is still increasing slightly, due to immigration from Europe.
As a whole, the nonwhite population increased by 1.9 percent to 116 million, or 37 percent of the U.S. The fastest percentage growth is among multiracial Americans, followed by Asians and Hispanics. Non-Hispanic whites make up 63 percent of the U.S.; Hispanics, 17 percent; blacks, 12.3 percent; Asians, 5 percent; and multiracial Americans, 2.4 percent.
About 353 of the nation's 3,143 counties, or 11 percent, are now "majority-minority." Six of those counties tipped to that status last year: Mecklenburg, N.C.; Cherokee, Okla.; Texas, Okla.; Bell, Texas; Hockley, Texas; and Terrell, Texas.
In 2012, 13 states and the District of Columbia had an under-5 age population that was "majority-minority," up from five states in 2000. In 25 states and the District of Columbia, minorities now make up more than 40 percent of the under-5 group.
Among the under-5 age group, 22 percent live in poverty, typically in more rural states such as Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana. Black toddlers were most likely to be poor, at 41 percent, followed by Hispanics at 32 percent and whites at 13 percent. Asian toddlers had a poverty rate of 11 percent.

"More so than ever, we need to recognize the importance of young minorities for the growth and vitality of our labor force and economy," said William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution who analyzed the census data.
Analysis by Timothy Smeeding, an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in income inequality, of the latest research and data on social mobility, provided to The Associated Press, shows that a child's achievement varies widely depending on a parent's education and income. The reason: More educated parents tend to have fewer children and generally earn more money than before, allowing them to spend larger amounts of time or money on a child's development, including music or art classes, extra tutoring, or travel and summer camps.
The gaps in achievement tend to emerge early in childhood, continuing through high school, and disparities are especially evident in SAT admission scores. College Board data show that average scores spread as wide as 130-140 points in each of the reading, math and writing sections for a student with family income of less than $20,000, compared with a student with family income exceeding $200,000.
About 40 percent of whites age 25-29 graduate from college, compared with 15 percent for Latinos and 23 percent for blacks.
Obama proposed expanding pre-K education for any 4-year-old whose family income was below twice the federal poverty rate, or $46,000 for a family of four. That is an increasingly minority age group that would benefit from what Obama calls the single most effective way to boost educational outcomes.
The plan would be paid for by a nearly $1 per pack federal cigarette tax. But at a time of strapped federal budgets, Republican lawmakers have been reluctant to expand the scope of government or raise new taxes. Medicare and Social Security costs due to aging of the mostly white baby boomer generation are also adding to the government burden.
A recent Rutgers University study found that state funding for pre-K programs had its largest drop ever last year, with states now spending less per child than a decade ago.

American Politics