Thursday, August 26, 2010

America's Debt:: The Big Wave Is Coming Soon

Damien Hoffman - This morning credit rating agency Standard & Poor’s (MHP) said in order for the US to keep its AAA-rating, it is “very important” for Congress to deal with the cascading US Debt. China’s largest credit rating agency Dagong Global Credit Rating Co. was less diplomatic: they simply downgraded the US credit rating to AA.

This, my friends, is only the tip of the iceberg of what will unfold should we choose to kick the proverbial can farther down the road. As you can see in the infographic below, according to the US Treasury we are watching a debt Tsunami come ashore. If we have any pride or patriotism, we’ve got to start dealing with the crisis now before it wipes out generations of wealth.

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

America "May Have Won 3.3 Million Jobs!

Le-gal In-sur-rection: - The credibility of the Congressional Budget Office suffered a grievous blow during the health care debate when the CBO was forced by Harry Reid to "score" Obamacare using preposterous and plainly contrived assumptions in order to keep the cost estimates below a trillion dollars.

Now, the CBO is damaging itself some more with wildly speculative estimates as to how many jobs, and how much economic growth, have been created by the Stimulus Plan. This headline at The Washington Post about the latest CBO report say it all: CBO says stimulus may have added 3.3 million jobs.

Notice the "may have" language. That is because the CBO is not calculating actual jobs created. Rather, it simply uses economic models which purport to predict how many jobs are created, and how much economic growth is generated, for each dollar of government spending.

Hence, the CBO gives extremely wide ranges to its estimates of how the economy was affected by the Stimulus Plan:

* "Raised the level of real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) by between 1.7 percent and 4.5 percent"
* "Lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.7 percentage points and 1.8 percentage points"
* "Increased the number of people employed by between 1.4 million and 3.3 million,"
* "Increased the number of full-time-equivalent (FTE) jobs by 2.0 million to 4.8 million compared with what those amounts would have been otherwise. (Increases in FTE jobs include shifts from part-time to full-time work or overtime and are thus generally larger than increases in the number of employed workers.)"

These are not real numbers, but you would not know it from the headlines.

The CBO does not even attempt, in its full report, to compare how the economy would have performed in the absence of the Stimulus Plan:

Although CBO has examined data on output and employment during the period since ARRA’s enactment, those data are not as helpful in determining ARRA’s economic effects as might be supposed because isolating the effects would require knowing what path the economy would have taken in the absence of the law.

The Heritage Foundation, in connection with an earlier CBO Stimulus report, noted the flawed methodology of the CBO:

The CBO's conclusion that the stimulus created jobs is based on an economic model that began with the premise that all stimulus bills create jobs. In other words, the conclusion is already assumed as a premise. Logicians call this the fallacy of begging the question. Mathematicians call it assuming what you are trying to prove....

The problem here is obvious. Once the CBO decided to assume that every dollar of government spending increased GDP by the multipliers above, its conclusion that the stimulus saved jobs was pre-ordained. The economy could have lost 30 million jobs, and the model would have said that the economy would otherwise have lost 31.5 million jobs without the stimulus. An asteroid could have hit the United States, wiping out everyone outside of Washington, D.C., and (as long as Washington still spent the stimulus money) the CBO's economic model would have produced the same stimulus jobs data. There is no adjustment made to reflect what actually happened in the economy after the stimulus was enacted.

The American people "may have" won 3.3 million jobs. This is what it has come to:

Mexican Marines Find 72 Bodies in Northern Mexico

MEXICO CITY — Mexican marines found the dumped bodies of 72 people at a rural location in northern Mexico following a shootout with suspected drug cartel gunmen that left one marine and three suspects dead, the Navy reported late Tuesday.

The cadavers of 58 men and 14 women were found at a spot near the Gulf coast south of the border city of Matamoros. It appears to be the largest drug-cartel body dumping ground found in Mexico since President Felipe Calderon launched an offensive against drug trafficking in late 2006.

"The federal government categorically condemns the barbarous acts committed by criminal organizations," The Navy said in a statement. "Society as a whole should condemn these type of acts, which illustrate the absolute necessity to continue fighting crime with all rigor."

Mexican drug cartels often use vacant lots, ranches or mine shafts to dump the bodies of executed rivals or kidnap victims. The Navy did not give details on the victims' identities, who had killed them or whether the bodies had been buried.

The discovery of bodies came about when Marines manning a checkpoint on a highway in northern Tamaulipas state were approached by a wounded man who said he had been attacked by cartel gunmen at a nearby ranch. The man was placed under the protection of federal authorities.

Navy aircraft were dispatched to the scene, and when the gunmen saw them, they opened fire on the marines and tried to flee in a convoy of vehicles.

In the ensuing shootout, one marine and three suspected gunmen were killed. Navy personnel seized 21 assault rifles, shotguns and rifles, and detained a minor.

The youth, who was apparently part of the gang, was handed over to civilian prosecutors.

When marines searched the area, near the town of San Fernando, Tamaulipas, they found the bodies. It was unclear whether the victims had been killed at the same time or separately, and the Navy did not say when they were found.

The area has been wracked by bloody turf battles between the Gulf drug cartel and their one-time allies, the Zetas drug gang.

In May, authorities discovered 55 bodies in an abandoned mine near Taxco, a colonial-era city south of Mexico City that is popular with international tourists.

In July, investigators found 51 corpses in two days of digging in a field near a trash dump outside the northern city of Monterrey. Many of those found were believed to have been rival traffickers. But cartels often dispose of the bodies of kidnap victims in such dumping grounds.

More than 28,000 people have been killed in violence tied to Mexico's drug war since the offensive began.

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

GZM IMAN: USA Has More Muslim Blood On It's Hands Than Al-Qaeda

Sister Toldjah - Is there really anything else we need to know about this man after this?

Waiting for the apologists on the left to feign ‘concern’ about the comments before asserting that he has the ‘right’ to say whatever he wants to, when none of this – not what he says, not the proposed site of the mosque – is about whether he has a right to do/say what he does, but whether or not it is right to do/say.

And we’re supposed to be “tolerant” when it comes to this blame-America firster? I don’t think so.

Mexican Bullets Shut Down El Paso, Texas

Newsvine.com - Yes, this is another dispatch from the war zone along the Mexican border (where I live in El Paso, right across from Juarez, Mexico–a stone’s throw, or bullet path, away).

This story–from events over the weekend, but still making news today in El Paso–is beyond belief. I thought things were bad when the El Paso City Hall was splattered with bullets from a firefight across the river. But this weekend El Paso police SHUT DOWN part of downtown El Paso because of flying bullets from a gun battle in a house on a hill in Juarez–a gun battle that evidently lasted 30 minutes and illed at least three people in Juarez. No one was–a matter of luck–killed in El Paso, although there are reports that a shattered car window may have been from a bullet. It is evidently estimated (no, they can’t know) that about 50 bullets came over the border into downtown El Paso.

And Obama has the GALL to tell me it is SAFER along the border. The man is a piece of work. I have lived in the El Paso area of the Southwest for approximately 50 years. At NO time, during that entire period, do I remember this kin of thing happening. I think the last time anything close to it happended were in the days of Pancho Villa.

Monday, August 23, 2010

L.A. Times Delivers A Pro -Muslim Spin On The Ground Zero Mosque

Patterico's Pontifications - The L.A. Times today publishes an article by Borzou Daragahi about how Muslims across the world disapprove of opposition to the Ground Zero mosque:

The heated debate across America over construction of the so-called ground zero mosque is reverberating across the globe, with the potential of creating a worldwide black eye for the United States.

Many Muslims abroad are miffed by the stateside debate, largely conducted by non-Muslims, that has grown so loud as to become a topic of discussion on talk shows and newspapers from Bali to Bahrain, from Baghdad to Berlin. The proposed Cordoba House has become a symbol of America’s fraught relations with the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims.

I don’t understand why anyone would discern hostile intentions from the builders. After all, t’s not like the project’s “moderate” imam Feisal Rauf is happy about the controversy, right?

“The fact we are getting this kind of attention is a sign of success,” Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf reportedly said Sunday with respect to the project, addressing a gathering at the U.S. ambassador’s residence in the Persian Gulf state of Bahrain.

“It is my hope that people will understand more,” Rauf said without elaborating, according to the AP.

Oh.

While the paper does report that quote in a separate article, portraying it as benign, the quote does not make it into this article.

That wouldn’t be good propaganda.

Amid a flurry of Arab complaints about the U.S. — we need to do something about Israel; we need to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan; etc. — the article does include the perspective of some Muslims that the mosque is a bad idea. See if you can figure out what aspect of that admission they leave out.

“Building a mosque there will increase hatred between Muslims and non-Muslims in the West,” said Gamal Awad, a professor at Cairo’s Al Azhar University. “It will further connect Islam with a horrible event.”

Al Aznar, eh? They’re the folks who declared the mosque a Zionist conspiracy — a little tidbit that the L.A. Times doesn’t tell you about.

That wouldn’t be good propaganda.

Are we seriously to believe that Borzou Daragahi, or his special correspondents — Amro Hassan in Cairo, Ranya Kadri in Amman, Jordan, Ramin Mostaghim in Tehran, or Meris Lutz in Beirut — elicited no anti-Semitic comments about the mosque being a Zionist conspiracy?

Or should we conclude, rather, that somewhere along the chain, such comments were deemed “unhelpful” to the agenda of the story?

Mexican Police Help Kill Their Own Local Mayor

Ioan Grillo - The murder scarred a part of Mexico that was supposed to be reasonably safe from violence and crime. Santiago is a picturesque town of waterfalls, colonial churches and holiday homes for the rich. Its mayor Edelmiro Cavazos was a blue-eyed 38-year old, educated in the United States. But it seems that no corner of the country is shielded from the relentless rain of drug-related bloodshed.

The killers came for Mayor Cavazos in the early hours of Aug. 16 when seven SUV's rolled up and men in police uniforms descended on his palatial home. Servants stood back terrified, as their boss was forced away at gunpoint. On Aug. 18, his corpse was dumped on a nearby road. There was a mercy of sorts in the manner of his killing - shot dead with two bullets in the head and one in the chest, and spared the mutilation and rape inflicted on so many other victims. The following day, hundreds of residents wept over his coffin in Santiago's central plaza, lining the stairs up to the church with candles and holding signs calling for peace. (See pictures of Culiac[a {a}]n, the home of Mexico's drug-trafficking industry.)

Then on Aug. 20, more disturbing news broke. State agents arrested six of the mayor's own police officers and said they confessed to involvement in the murder. The suspects had been working for a drug cartel that is fighting a bloody turf war with its rival throughout northeast Mexico, state prosecutors said. Another four alleged gunmen were arrested with automatic rifles and grenade launchers in their possession and accused of being involved in the plot. The revelation had very concerning implications: in Mexico's drug war, officials are now killing officials.

Cavazos - a member of President Felipe Calderon's conservative National Action Party - was the latest in a series of politicians who have been killed or kidnapped this year. In June, a commando group of gunmen assassinated the front-running gubernatorial candidate in the neighboring state of Tamaulipas. In May, a former presidential candidate was kidnapped from his ranch in Central Mexico and is still missing. A mayoral candidate and state legislator have also been murdered. Following the latest slaying, President Calderon said that Mexico's very democracy is under threat. "The death of Edelmiro, makes us angry and obliges us to double our efforts in the struggle against these criminal cowards that attack citizens," he said.

But despite calls for national unity to face this challenge, Mexico's politicians keep slinging mud and trading mutual recriminations over who is to blame. Opposition deputies say that Calderon's policy of sending the entire army after cartels has been catastrophic, inflaming turf wars and shoot-outs. Since Calderon took office in December 2006, there have been an incredible 28,000 drug-related killings, it was recently revealed. Calderon has answered back, challenging the opposition to come up with a better idea. (See pictures of Mexico's drug wars.)

When the president called for a dialog with Congress this week to work out a national security plan, key leaders in two major parties snubbed him and said they had other engagements. An irritated Calderon then said that soldiers would stay on the streets until his last day in office in 2012. Politicians could not even manage to unify over the latest tragedy. As National Action Party militants prepared posters lamenting the death of Mayor Cavazos, the opposition accused them of political opportunism. (See pictures of Mexico City's police fighting crime.)

With Mexico's justice system failing to clear up the facts surrounding the the vast majority of killings, it is unclear exactly why politicians are being targeted. Federal agents say that gangsters are desperate after so many drug busts and arrests and are lashing back at the system in the hope the army will be sent back to the barracks. However, the government has also conceded there are cases of corruption with elected officials themselves in cahoots with drug gangs. In May, police arrested former Cancun mayor and gubernatorial candidate Greg Sanchez on racketeering and drug smuggling charges. On Aug. 19, gunmen attacked the judge in charge of Sanchez's case, killing his bodyguard. Calderon responded that Mexico should consider judges with protected identities to handle drug-related cases. Officials have also come under fire for attacking corrupt officers. Following an attack on the Public Safety Secretary of Michoacan this year, an arrested cartel member said she has been targeted for trying to shake up the state police force, threatening officers on their payroll.

There are fears that that many more officials could be in danger. Sen. Ramon Galindo, the former mayor of murder capital Ciudad Juarez, said he knew of dozens of mayors who had received threats. "It is clear that organized crime groups are not only threatening but are also doing great harm to local politicians," Galindo said. Back in Santiago, the fallen mayor's mother Rubinia Leal de Cavazos told reporters that her son had feared attacks. "I told him to watch out for traitors and to leave his job," she said, shielding her tearful eyes with sunglasses. "He never said he was scared. I hugged him and told him I loved him."

Sunday, August 22, 2010

Google's And Government Plans To Take Over The Internet Exposed!

Google’s agreement with Verizon to speed certain Internet content to users opens the door to the complete sterilization of the world wide web as a force for political change. Under Google’s takeover plan, the Internet will closely resemble cable TV, independent voices will be silenced and the entire Internet will be bought up by transnational media giants.