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2010
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- Barker's Newsbites: Friday, July 30, 2010
- Barker's Newsbites: Thursday, July 29, 2010
- U.S. v. Arizona -- No. CV 10-1413-PHX-SRB
- Barker's Newsbites: Wednesday, July 28, 2010
- Barker's Newsbites: Tuesday, July 27, 2010
- Summer Reading 2010
- Barker's Newsbites: Monday, July 26, 2010
- Weekend Newsbites: Sat. & Sun., July 24 & 25, 2010
- Barker's Newsbites: Friday, July 23, 2010
- Barker's Newsbites: Thursday, July 22, 2010
- Barker's Newsbites: Wednesday, July 21, 2010
- Barker's Newsbites: Tuesday, July 20, 2010
- Barker's Newsbites: Monday, July 19, 2010
- Weekend Newsbites: Sat. & Sun., July 17 & 18, 2010
- Barker's Newsbites: Friday, July 16, 2010
- Barker's Newsbites: Thursday, July 15, 2010
- Barker's Newsbites: Wednesday, July 14, 2010
- Barker's Newsbites: Tuesday, July 13, 2010
- Barker's Newsbites: Monday, July 12, 2010
- Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandes
- Weekend Newsbites: Sat. & Sun., July 10 & 11
- Barker's Newsbites: Friday, July 9, 2010
- Barker's Newsbites: Thursday, July 8, 2010
- Barker's Newsbites: Wednesday, July 7, 2010
- Barker's Newsbites: Tuesday, July 6, 2010
- Weekend Newsbites: Sat., Sun., & Mon., July 3/4/5
- Barker's Newsbites: Friday, July 2, 2010
- Operation Wetback
- Barker's Newsbites: Thursday, July 1, 2010
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July
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About Me
- William R. Barker
- Pearl River, NY High School Class of '81; Northeastern University, Boston, MA Class of '87.
9 comments:
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE66O1G220100725
More NATO troops will die in Afghanistan as violence mounts over the summer...
The remarks by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, on a visit to the country, came as the Taliban said they were holding captive one of two U.S. servicemen who strayed into insurgent territory, and that the other had been killed.
It also comes less than a week since a major international conference in Kabul agreed that the Afghan government should aim to take responsibility for security in all parts of the country by 2014.
* THE CORRUPT AFGHAN GOVERNMENT - THE KLEPTOCRACY WHICH PLAYS BOTH SIDES AGAINST THE MIDDLE.
(*SHAKING MY HEAD IN DISGUST*)
* SERIOUSLY... IF YOU FOLKS AREN'T READING "NEWSBITES" EVERY DAY I HOPE TO HELL YOU'RE READING SOMETHING...
Mullen, who called the troops' disappearance an "unusual circumstance," said there would be more violent incidents to come...
(*SIGH*)
* HEY... THEY VOLUNTEERED - RIGHT? THAT'S THE THINKING... SCREW 'EM IF THEY CAN'T TAKE A "JOKE," RIGHT?
* LARGE NUMBERS OF MY FELLOW AMERICANS OFTEN MAKE ME SICK, BUT ON THE SUBJECT OF AFGHANISTAN THE COMBINATION OF IGNORANCE, WILLFUL BLINDNESS, AND SIMPLY NOT GIVING A DAMN PARTICULARLY GALLS ME.
Elsewhere, Taliban guerrillas captured a remote district from the Afghan government after days of clashes in eastern Nuristan province, officials said on Sunday.
(*SARCASTIC CLAP-CLAP-CLAP*)
A spokesman for the Interior Ministry said police were working to recapture Barg-i-Matal, a district that has changed hands several times in recent months.
(*SIGH*)
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20100726/D9H6MNPO0.html
ABC's "The View" has welcomed many notable guests, but none more prominent than President Barack Obama, who is scheduled to visit for Thursday's edition.
In making the announcement on Monday, executive producers Barbara Walters and Bill Geddie said this marks the first time a sitting U.S. president has visited a daytime talk show.
They said the majority of the hour will be devoted to Obama's appearance...
(*SIGH*)
* AND SO IT GOES... AND SO IT GOES...
Obama's appearance is part of the show's continuing "Red, White & View" campaign, which is committed to political guests and discussions. The show welcomed Vice President Joe Biden in April.
(*SNORT*) (*CHUCKLE*)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/7908742/Axe-falls-on-NHS-services.html
* THE FUTURE IS COMING TO AMERICA, FOLKS...
(*SIGH*)
[The U.K.'s] National Health Service bosses have drawn up secret plans for sweeping cuts to services, with restrictions on the most basic treatments for the sick and injured.
An investigation by The Sunday Telegraph has uncovered widespread cuts planned across the NHS, many of which have already been agreed by senior health service officials. They include:
Restrictions on some of the most basic and common operations, including hip and knee replacements, cataract surgery and orthodontic procedures.
Dying cancer patients to be told to manage their own symptoms if their condition worsens at evenings or weekends.
Closure of nursing homes for the elderly.
500 staff to go at a trust where cancer patients recently suffered delays in diagnosis and treatment because of staff shortages.
The Sunday Telegraph found the details of hundreds of cuts buried in obscure appendices to lengthy policy and strategy documents published by trusts. In most cases, local communities appear to be unaware of the plans.
* SOUND FAMILIAR, FOLKS...??? NAH... WHAT COULD OUR POLITICIANS POSSIBLE HIDE IN MULTI-THOUSAND PAGE BILLS WHICH NO ONE HAS READ IN THEIR ENTIRETY.
(*SMIRK*)
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20100725/D9H6BSN80.html
BELL, Calif. (AP) - Several hundred angry residents from a modest blue-collar Los Angeles suburb marched Sunday to call for the resignation of the mayor and some City Council members in a protest sparked by the sky-high salaries of three recently departed administrators.
The protest was organized by Bell Association to Stop the Abuse, a group founded after the Times reported that Bell's city manager, police chief and assistant city manager were all being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, with city manager Robert Rizzo collecting a check of $787,637. All three resigned on Friday.
One in six residents of the city of 40,000 southeast of Los Angeles lives in poverty.
The newspaper also revealed that the mayor and three of the council's four other members make about $100,000 a year, most of it in salaries for sitting on boards and commissions. Only Councilman Lorenzo Velez makes a modest salary of about $8,000 a year.
"I don't think they are taking it seriously. And we're serious," event organizer and longtime Bell resident Nestor Valencia, 45, told the Los Angeles Times. "They need to resign."
* ACTUALLY, WHAT NEEDS TO HAPPEN IS FOR THE CROWD TO TAKE THE LAW INTO THEIR OWN HANDS AND TAR AND FEATHER THE MISCREANTS.
* YES, FOLKS... SOMETIMES VIOLENCE IS INDEED THE ANSWER!
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703995104575389430430274968.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
Democrats have been running Congress for nearly four years, and President Obama has been at the White House for 18 months, so it's not too soon to ask: How's that working out?
(*DRY CHUCKLE*)
One devastating scorecard came out Friday from the White House, in the form of its own semi-annual budget review. The message: Tax revenues are smaller, spending is greater, and the deficits are thus larger than the White House has been saying.
(No wonder it dumped the news on the eve of a sweltering mid-July weekend.)
As a share of the economy, the White House now says the deficit in fiscal 2010, which ends on September 30, will be even larger than in 2009 - [coming in at] 10%. ... More remarkable still, the deficit will barely fall in fiscal 2011, declining only to 9.2% of GDP in the second year of a recovery that ought to be gaining steam.
* WHAT RECOVERY...?!?! THERE IS NO FRIGG'N RECOVERY!!!
To put this in historical context, consider...the Reagan deficits never reached more than 6% of GDP, and that happened only in 1983, the first year of economic recovery.
* AND REAGAN HAD TIP O'NEIL TO DEAL WITH! AS THIS PIECE NOTES, DEMOCRATS HAVE CONTROLLED BOTH HOUSES OF CONGRESS - AND THUS THE NATION'S PURSE STRINGS - SINCE JANUARY 2007! (CHECK YOUR WATCHES FOLKS... IT'S NOW JULY 2010!)
As the 1980s expansion continued, the deficits fell, especially as the pace of spending slowed in the latter part of Reagan's second term. Few remember now, but when Ross Perot won 19% of the Presidential vote in 1992 running more or less on the single issue of the deficit, the budget hole was only 4.7% of GDP.
* BASICALLY, OBAMA IS DO THE OPPOSITE OF EVERYTHING REAGAN DID - WITH PREDICTABLE DISASTROUS RESULTS... (*SIGH*)
The Obama deficits are double that, and more than one-third higher than even the Gipper's worst year. What explains this? Part of it is that Democrats are simply spending much more, sending outlays as a share of GDP above 25% for the first time since World War II.
(The White House now says outlays will be higher in 2011, at 25.1% of GDP, than at the height of the stimulus in 2009 and 2010.)
This is an ironic tribute to the degree to which Democrats on Capitol Hill have been increasing spending willy-nilly below the media radar. The 111th Congress is the most spendthrift in a century outside of World Wars I and II.
Democrats have been undertaking a vast fiscal policy experiment, blowing out the federal balance sheet in an effort to show that a country can spend and tax its way to prosperity. Look no further than the numbers in the White House's own budget review for the unhappy lab results.
http://www.nationalreview.com/exchequer/231376/words-i-never-expected-type
Man, I miss the fiscal discipline of the Bush era!
Gulp.
I never expected to write those words. The Bush-era Republicans were out-of-control big spenders, fiending for appropriations, handing out largesse, creating giant new health-care entitlements here, building nations there, all with a devil-may-care attitude about where the money would come from. They were all carrot and no stick, cutting taxes but not doing a thing about spending.
And then:
A mid-year budget review by the Obama administration forecasts the deficit will be $1.47 trillion this year and $1.42 trillion next year...
Let me see if I can type this right: $1,470,000,000,000.00 - and that is just the part of the bill that we do not know how to pay. The actual bill for government spending this year is more than twice that. We are borrowing 41 cents of every dollar we spend.
That is the biggest deficit in the history of the United States of America, in gross dollars...[this is also] the biggest deficit in the history of the United States of America since World War II, as a portion of GDP.
That deficit is about 10% of GDP; the Bush-era deficits were typically about 3% of GDP.
These future deficits are driven almost exclusively by rising spending. President Obama’s budget would push inflation-adjusted federal spending past $36,000 per household by 2020 - $12,000 above the level that prevailed under President Bush.
The President concedes that the unemployment rate will remain at nearly 10% this year and [is] not [forecast to] revert to pre-recession levels until 2016 - and even that is based on the same optimistic Keynesian economic models that claim the stimulus "created" or "saved" 3 million jobs.
(*SMIRK*)
If this is economic policy success, one wonders how failure would look.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1e1b3764-98b1-11df-a0b7-00144feab49a.html
When western politicians talk about “credibility” in Afghanistan, it is often their own credibility they are worrying about most. America’s military timetable in Afghanistan already seems tailored to ensure that the US does not “lose” before the next presidential election.
Whenever western leaders ask themselves the question, why are we in Afghanistan, they come up with essentially the same reply: “To prevent Afghanistan becoming a failed state and a haven for terrorists.”
Until Afghanistan is stable, so the argument goes, we cannot risk withdrawal.
Yet there is very little evidence that Afghanistan is becoming more stable. On the contrary, the fighting is intensifying, casualties are mounting and the Taliban are becoming more confident.
So perhaps it is time to rephrase the question. Rather than asking, “Why are we in Afghanistan?”, we should ask, “If we are in Afghanistan, why are we not also in Somalia, Yemen or Pakistan?” All three countries are now plausible bases for potential terrorists.
* BINGO! THIS HAS ALWAYS BEEN THE QUESTION! (IT'S ALWAYS BEEN MY QUESTION AT LEAST...)
Somalia, in particular, looks increasingly like Afghanistan before 2001. It is an almost completely failed state and western nationals are known to be undergoing terrorist training there. Somalia’s central government controls little more than a few blocks around the presidential palace in Mogadishu and the airport. The rest of the country is home to a radical Islamist insurgency, as well as to pirate fleets that prey on international shipping. Somalia is also exporting terrorism to its neighbours, as a recently deadly bombing in Uganda has illustrated.
* WHY AREN'T OBAMA AND HIS DEMPUBLICAN/REPUBLICRAT SUPPORTERS IN THE "WAR PARTY" INSISTING ON "LIBERATING" SOMALIA?
Yemen, which borders Saudi Arabia and lies across the sea from Somalia, is also attracting increasing concern from western intelligence agencies.
(*SHRUG*)
[I]t has long been known that the remnants of al-Qaeda’s leadership are now based in Pakistan, not Afghanistan.
(*SHRUG*)
The west is fighting a war on terrorism in Afghanistan. But the terrorists are somewhere else. Meanwhile, our ability to combat threats around the world is sapped by the huge drain on resources caused by the Afghan war.
The lesson of Somalia and Pakistan is that counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency are different things. It is possible to combat terrorist groups without getting sucked into a major war and state-building exercise of the sort that the west has committed itself to in Afghanistan. That, in turn, suggests that Nato should look to withdraw troops from Afghanistan much faster than currently envisaged - and to refocus the mission much more tightly on counter-terrorism.
[T]o keep asking troops to fight and die in Afghanistan to avoid electoral inconvenience is immoral.
* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/banking/2010-07-24-goldman-bailout-cash_N.htm
Goldman Sachs sent $4.3 billion in federal tax money to 32 entities, including many overseas banks, hedge funds and pensions, according to information made public Friday night.
* THE KEY WORD UP ABOVE BEING "OVERSEAS."
Goldman Sachs disclosed the list of companies to the Senate Finance Committee after a threat of subpoena from Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA). "We thought originally we were bailing out AIG. Then later on ... we learned that the money flowed through AIG to a few big banks, and now we know that the money went from these few big banks to dozens of financial institutions all around the world."
* WHAT IS THIS "WE THOUGHT" NONSENSE?! IF CONGRESS WAS LIED TO BY THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH AND/OR THE FEDERAL RESERVE, THEN A CRIME WAS CLEARLY COMMITTED.
* EITHER CONGRESS "AUTHORIZED" THIS BULLSHIT OR IT DIDN'T!
Goldman Sachs (GS) received $5.55 billion from the government in fall of 2008 as payment for then-worthless securities it held in AIG. ... Overall, Goldman Sachs received a $12.9 billion payout from the government's bailout of AIG...
Goldman Sachs also revealed to the Senate Finance Committee that it would have received $2.3 billion if AIG had gone under. Other large financial institutions, such as Citibank, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley, sold Goldman Sachs protection in the case of AIG's collapse. Those institutions did not have to pay Goldman Sachs after the government stepped in with tax money.
Shouldn't Goldman Sachs be expected to collect from those institutions "before they collect the taxpayers' dollars?" Grassley asked. "It's a little bit like a farmer, if you got crop insurance, you shouldn't be getting disaster aid."
* HEAD'S GOLDMAN WINS; TAILS GOLDMAN WINS; HEADS THE TAXPAYER LOSES; TAILS THE TAXPAYER LOSES.
* HOPEFULLY THERE'S NO NEED TO ONCE AGAIN TIE TOGETHER LINKS BETWEEN THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION AND OBAMA ADMINISTRATION AND GOP AND DNC WITH GOLDMAN SACHS... (*SIGH*)
* To be continued...
* CONTINUING... (Part 2 of 2)
Goldman had not disclosed the names of the counterparties it paid in late 2008 until Friday, despite repeated requests from Elizabeth Warren, chairwoman of the Congressional Oversight Panel.
The initial $85 billion to bail out AIG was supplemented by an additional $49.1 billion from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, known as TARP, as well as additional funds from the Federal Reserve. AIG's debt to U.S. taxpayers totals $133.3 billion outstanding.
* HEY... AS LONG AS GOLDMAN MAKES OUT... (*SNORT*)
* FOLKS... THE MORE YOU KNOW... THE MORE VIOLENCE SEEMS THE ONLY VIABLE OPTION TO "CORRECT" THE CURRENT POLITICAL SITUATION HERE IN THE UNITED STATES.
The list of companies receiving money includes a few familiar foreign banks, such as the Royal Bank of Scotland and Barclays.
DZ AG Deutsche Zantrake Genossenschaftz Bank, a German cooperative banking group, received $1.2 billion, more than a quarter of the money Goldman paid out.
Warren, in testimony Wednesday, said that the rescue of AIG "distorted the marketplace by turning AIG's risky bets into fully guaranteed transactions. Instead of forcing AIG and its counterparties to bear the costs of the company's failure, the government shifted those costs in full onto taxpayers."
* YA THINK...?!?! PEOPLE LIKE ME HAVE BEEN SAYING THIS ALL ALONG!
AIG received the bailout of $85 billion at the discretion of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which was led at the time by Timothy Geithner. He now is U.S. treasury secretary.
"I think it proves that he knew a lot more at the time than he told," Grassley said. "And he surely knew where this money was going to go. If he didn't, he should have known before they let the money out of their bank up there."
An attempt to reach Geithner Friday night through the White House public information office was unsuccessful.
[T]he AIG bailout was negotiated under President George W. Bush...
* AND SUPPORTED BY THEN-SENATOR BARAK OBAMA. (*SMIRK*)
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