Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Barker's Newsbites: Wednesday, March 21, 2012


Well, folks, as always, I'll attempt to illuminate what's really going on in America and throughout the world.

And as usual... it ain't good.
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12 comments:

William R. Barker said...

http://www.concordcoalition.org/press-releases/2012/0320/concord-coalition-commends-paul-ryan-proposing-major-entitlement-and-tax-re

The Concord Coalition today commended House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) for including proposals to rein in federal health care spending and greatly simplify the tax code as part of his Fiscal Year 2013 budget. Concord cautioned, however, that the favorable deficit reduction numbers shown in Ryan's budget depend upon a broad array of policy choices that are not spelled out and seem unrealistic.

* OH... IS THAT THE ONLY PROBLEM...?!?! DEPENDENCE UPON A BROAD ARRAY OF POLICY CHOICES THAT ARE NOT SPELLED OUT AND SEEM UNREALISTIC...?!?!

(*SNORT*) (*SNICKER*)

The assumptions for discretionary spending appear unrealistic, both in the short term and longer term.

* HMM... HOW'BOUT THE MID TERM...?

(*RUEFUL CHUCKLE*)

* FOLKS... MY ADVICE? STOCK UP ON GUNS AND AMMO.

March 21, 2012 at 8:14 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2012/03/20/voter-turnout-extremely-low-for-illinois-primary/

Turnout for Tuesday’s Illinois primary in Chicago was a meager 24%, officials said. It was the lowest turnout for a presidential primary in the past 70 years.

(*SHRUG*)

* YEP... ROMNEY IS... er... WINNING.

(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD IN DESPAIR*)

* FOLKS... THE TACTICS THE ROMNEY CAMPAIGN AND ROMNEY'S GOP AND "CONSERVATIVE" MEDIA BACKERS HAVE EMPLOYED TO BEAT HIS RIVALS... (*SIGH*)... CLEARLY THE "SIDE EFFECTS" ARE DEVASTATING.

GOP front-runner Mitt Romney...rolled to an easy win in Illinois over his main rival, Rick Santorum, but that didn’t equate to enthusiasm for Romney, an expert said.

“You could draw a larger crowd at a Green Bay Packers rally in downtown Chicago than what Mr. Romney delivered yesterday in Illinois,” U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL.) said Wednesday on CBS This Morning.

(*SNORT*)

Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul, largely ignored Illinois.

(*PURSED LIPS*) (*SIGH*)

March 21, 2012 at 8:21 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2012/03/obama-hq-holds-offtherecord-briefing-with-romneys-118098.html

The Obama 2012 team hosted an off-the-record briefing for Mitt Romney's press corps at Chicago headquarters [on Primary Tuesday].

* WHY? WHY "OFF THE RECORD?" FOLKS... (*SIGH*)

The Romney campaign, which has had a complicated relationship with its press corps, seems to have been unaware that the meeting took place.

(*SNORT*)

* OH, YEAH... ROMNEY... THE CONSUMMATE MANAGER. ALWAYS ON TOP OF THINGS!

(*SNORT*)

March 21, 2012 at 8:26 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/world/asia/gulf-widens-between-us-and-an-increasingly-hostile-karzai.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

The Americans in Afghanistan are “demons.”

They claim they burned Korans by mistake, but really those were “Satanic acts that will never be forgiven by apologies.”

The massacre of 16 Afghan children, women and men by an American soldier “was not the first incident, indeed it was the 100th, the 200th and 500th incident.”

Such harsh talk may sound as if it comes from the Taliban, but those are all remarks either made personally by the United States’ increasingly hostile "ally" here, President Hamid Karzai, or issued by his office in recent days and weeks.

The strongest such outburst came Friday. “Let’s pray for God to rescue us from these two demons,” Mr. Karzai said, apparently holding back tears at a meeting with relatives of the massacre victims, and clearly referring to the United States and the Taliban in the same breath. “There are two demons in our country now.”

(*SARCASTIC CLAP-CLAP-CLAP*)

The White House went to lengths last week to depict Mr. Karzai’s call for Americans to hand over control a year earlier, by 2013, as no change in policy — only to have Mr. Karzai pointedly insist the next day that it was.

(*SMIRK*)

* FOLKS... OUR FOREIGN POLICY IS A FRIGG'N DISASTER. THERE'S SIMPLY NO OTHER WAY TO DESCRIBE IT.

March 21, 2012 at 8:36 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.freedomworks.org/blog/max/see-how-they-voted-here-key-vote-roll-call-0

http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=112&session=2&vote=00052

Yesterday, March 20th, 2012, the U.S. Senate voted on an amendment to the JOBS Act that would have reauthorized the Export-Import Bank (Ex-Im).

The amendment, S.Amdt. 1836, was introduced by Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington.

FreedomWorks opposed this legislation because the Ex-Im Bank is a corporate welfare program which provides government-backed loans to selected private companies.

The government should not be in the practice of picking winners and losers in the private sector, and therefore the Ex-Im Bank should not be reauthorized.

The vote for cloture, or end of debate, on the Ex-Im amendment required sixty votes in order to pass. Fortunately, all but [four] Senate Republicans joined together to oppose the amendment, and it failed 55-44.

Scott Brown voted with Reid.
Susan Collins voted with Reid.
Dean Heller voted with Reid.

Mark Kirk did not vote.

March 21, 2012 at 1:01 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://dailycaller.com/2012/03/21/ice-admits-releasing-alleged-child-rapist/

A suspected child rapist is on the loose and in a statement obtained exclusively by The Daily Caller, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement accepts responsibility for releasing him.

The man is identified by ICE as Amado Espinoza-Ramirez. Chicago police arrested him last August, and he was ultimately charged with forty-two counts of predatory sexual acts.

A publicly available inventory of the charges against Espinoza-Ramirez lists multiple counts of sexual relations within the family, multiple counts of sexual assault with the use of force and multiple counts of sexual assault involving a minor less than thirteen years old.

* READ THE FULL STORY, FOLKS. UTTER INCOMPETENCE ON THE PART OF ICE. (NOTHING UNUSUAL THERE..) (*GRITTING MY TEETH*)

March 21, 2012 at 5:08 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.moneynews.com/streettalk/aftershock-government-debt-numbers/2012/03/20/id/433216?PROMO_CODE=E76D-1

“The money from Heaven will be the path to Hell,” Robert Wiedemer, author of New York Times best-selling book Aftershock, unapologetically warns Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and President Barak Obama in a recent interview.

Wiedemer is among a small group of financial experts notifying the Washington, D.C., establishment that their addiction to spending (the money from Heaven) will hurl America into economic cataclysm (Hell).

Commodities investment expert Jim Rogers adds to Wiedemer’s words of caution, “America is going to pay the price for all these mistakes . . . Mr. Bernanke has been wrong for 400 weeks in a row now. He’s never right about anything.”

* YEP. THAT PRETTY MUCH COVERS IT. APPOINTED BY BUSH... REAPPOINTED BY OBAMA. YEP... (*SIGH*)

In a CNBC interview, billionaire Donald Trump says Bernanke’s printing policy will lead to “massive inflation” and is warning investors to take steps now to protect themselves.

Most dismiss such warnings. But consider this: Since Obama’s inauguration, the federal debt has increased by $4.2 trillion. That is more than ALL the debt racked up from the birth of our country through President George H.W. Bush, according to CNS News. That comes out to a staggering $53,642 per family of four.

When Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, interest owed on debt, and other obligations are included, America’s real debt is a daunting $55 trillion, leaving the average family of four with a jaw-dropping bill of $683,161.

But the question becomes, will this massive debt directly impact the average person in America?

* WE'RE ALREADY SEEING IT. WE'VE BEEN SEEING IT. THE ONLY THING THAT'S "SAVED" US (TO AN EXTENT) SO FAR IS THAT THE GAME IS RIGGED ACROSS THE GLOBE.

“The Fed has done everything it can to give Americans the appearance of a recovery. It bailed out its friends at the banks and automotive companies. It has kept interest rates at historic lows. And, it turned on the printing presses and drastically grew the monetary supply by 300 percent. And, all this has done is delay the inevitable,” insists Wiedemer.

March 21, 2012 at 5:20 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/294035/critical-look-ryan-plan-veronique-de-rugy

The overwhelming response coming out of the free-market movement is that the proposed Ryan plan is great. And parts of that plan are good. But...this plan isn’t [proposing] nearly enough [true reform] to reduce the size of government and make our lives and the lives of our children and grandchildren better.

Considering the situation we are in today, the size of government, the level of our debt, the continuous violations of our economic and personal freedoms, free-market advocates should be breathing fire everyday and fight for truly smaller government. This plan isn’t enough. It doesn’t balance the budget in the next ten years. In fact, if everything goes according to plan, we won’t have a balanced budget for decades.

Note: There are several plans out there showing that it can be done within the next 10 years or less. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), for instance, has a plan that would balance the budget fairly quickly and create a far more stable framework.

The Ryan Plan will spend $4.9 trillion in 2022. That’s $1.2 trillion more than we spend today under the plan ($3.6 trillion). That’s before the explosion of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. That’s only 13% less than the president’s plan!

It focuses on a few villains like high-speed rail and the president’s healthcare law but it fails to propose the elimination of programs, agencies, or departments that should be terminated either because they are the responsibility of the state and local governments or the private sector.

Ryan's Plan once again fails to reform Social Security. This comes at a time when Republicans continue to support cuts to the payroll tax without reductions in benefits. Maybe more importantly, if you want to preserve Social Security, without reform the program will grow itself into insolvency hurting the poorest in our society.

It reneges on sequestration-induced reductions in military spending (it finds the “savings” elsewhere). I think a serious plan would put everything on the table. More importantly, this will guaranty that no one in their right mind will ever agree to make a deal with Republicans since they will turn around and try to change the terms of the contract they don’t like.

(If they didn’t want defense cuts, they shouldn’t have made them part of the debt ceiling deal.)

This plan doesn’t close the emergency loopholes. This means that spending cuts brought about by the BCA caps or the Ryan budget can be easily restored [simply] by claiming that the spending is an emergency [whether it is or it isn't].

On Medicare reform... why push off urgent reforms for a decade?

According to the Trustees’ Report, Medicare will become insolvent by 2024. If you read the letter at the back of the Trustees’ report, however, it is obvious that these are extremely rosy estimates and Medicare will be insolvent way sooner than that. This is a good example of dessert-now-spinach-later policy. In this case, however, older people are the only ones eating desert and younger people are left with the spinach and little prospect of any dessert at all.

[Finally,] the proposal includes no credible plan to force future Congresses to implement its reforms.

Considering the level of compromises and the amount of watering down that Congress will do once they put their hands on this or any budget, the original document should have been much stronger.

March 21, 2012 at 5:59 PM
William R. Barker said...

* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/03/21/us_troops_as_campaign_props.html

* BY COL. RALPH PETERS (RET.)

The problem in Afghanistan isn’t our troops...it’s a leadership in and out of uniform that is bankrupt of ideas, bankrupt of ethics, bankrupt of moral courage and rich only in self-interest and ambition.

If there’s a “battle cry” in Afghanistan, it’s “Blame the troops!” Generals out of touch with the ugly, brute reality on the ground down in the Taliban-sympathizing villages respond to every seeming crisis in Afghan-American relations by telling our troops to “respect Afghan culture.”

But generals don’t have a clue about Afghan “culture.” They interact with well-educated, privileged, English-speaking Afghans who know exactly which American buttons to press to keep the tens of billions of dollars in annual aid flowing. The troops, on the other hand, daily encounter villagers who will not warn them about Taliban-planted booby traps or roadside bombs, who obviously want them to leave, who relish the abject squalor in which they live and who appear to value the lives of their animals above those of their women. When our Soldiers and Marines hear, yet again, that they need to “respect Afghan culture,” they must want to puke up their rations.

When I was a young officer in training, we mocked the European “chateaux generals” of the First World War who gave their orders from elegant headquarters without ever experiencing the reality faced by the troops in the trenches. We never thought that we’d have chateaux generals of our own, but now we do. Flying down to visit an outpost and staying just long enough to pin on a medal or two, get a dog-and-pony-show briefing and have a well-scripted tea session with a carefully selected “good” tribal elder, then winging straight back to a well-protected headquarters where the electronics are more real than the troops is not the way to develop a “fingertips feel” for on-the-ground reality.

Add in the human capacity for self-delusion, and you have a surefire prescription for failure.

* TO BE CONTINUED...

March 21, 2012 at 6:35 PM
William R. Barker said...

* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)

Right now, our troops are being used as props in a campaign year, as pawns by dull-witted generals who just don’t know what else to do, and as cash cows by corrupt Afghan politicians, generals and warlords (all of whom agree that it’s virtuous to rob the Americans blind).

What are our goals? What is our strategy? We’re told, endlessly, that things are improving in Afghanistan, yet, ten years ago, a U.S. Army general, unarmed, could walk the streets of Kabul without risk. Today, there is no city in Afghanistan where a U.S. general could stroll the streets.

We may not have a genius for war, but we sure do have a genius for kidding ourselves.

Now we’re told that we have to stay to build the Afghan military and police.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph! And Allah’s knickers, too! We’ve been training and equipping the Afghan army and the Afghan cops (and robbers) for ten years. In World War II, we turned out a mass military of our own in a year or so. The problem in Afghanistan isn’t that we haven’t tried, but that the Afghans are not interested in fighting for the exuberantly corrupt Karzai regime.

Right now, our troops are dying to preserve a filthy Kabul government whose president blatantly stole the last election and which has no hope of gaining the support of its own people. Meanwhile, despite repeated claims that the Taliban is on its last legs, the religious fanatics remain the home team backed by Afghanistan’s Pashtun majority. (If the people didn’t back them, the Taliban would, indeed, have been long gone—we need to face reality.)

Recently, another friend, who clings to (now-retired) General Petraeus’s counterinsurgency notion that, if we just hang on and give the Afghans enough free stuff, they’ll come around to the American way of life, told me, yet again, “You should hear the intercepts we get from the low-level Taliban fighters…they’re in a panic…”

That’s the old Vietnam line: “We win every firefight!”

Sure, we whip the Taliban every time we catch them with their weapons (if they’re not holding weapons, we can’t engage, even if they just killed Americans). But we dare not attack the Taliban leadership in Pakistan, where it’s protected by our “allies.” And no matter how many Taliban we kill, they still attract volunteers willing to die for their cause. The Afghans we train turn their guns on us.

It appears that the staff sergeant who murdered those Afghan villagers had cracked under the stresses of a war we won’t allow our troops to fight. But the real madness is at the top, in the White House, where President Obama can’t see past the November election; in Congress, where Republicans cling to whatever war they’ve got; and in uniform, where our generals have run out of ideas and moral courage.

That staff sergeant murdered sixteen Afghans. Our own leaders have murdered thousands and maimed tens of thousands of our own troops out of vanity, ambition and inertia. Who deserves our sympathy?

In war, soldiers die. But they shouldn’t die for bullshit.

March 21, 2012 at 6:35 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/03/21/sketching-a-shapeless-romney-fallout-from-a-top-aide-s-etch-a-sketch-remark.html

Mitt Romney was riding high after his Illinois victory when a top adviser made the colossal blunder of comparing him to...

* AN ETCH-A-SKETCH.

* SO WHERE'S THE "BLUNDER?" (OH... THEY MEAN TELLING THE TRUTH! I GET IT NOW...)

(*SMIRK*)

In a phrase so potentially damaging it might have been hatched in a laboratory by James Carville, Romney communications director Eric Fehrnstrom bobbled a routine question on CNN about whether Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich “might force the governor to tack so far to the right it would hurt him with moderate voters in the general election.”

His response: “Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch-a-Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again.”

(*SARCASTIC CLAP-CLAP-CLAP*)

The unmistakable image: Romney has no fixed principles.

* DUH!

Forget about what he’s saying in the primaries, all we have to do is hit the reset button. His positions are no more firmly held than the leaden particles that form those boxy images on the screen and then dissolve with a mere shake.

* YEP. PRETTY MUCH.

With one brand name from the pre-digital age, Fehrnstrom has managed to revive every stereotype of Romney as a closet moderate who is pandering to the Republican right solely for the purpose of securing the nomination. I’m sure Fehrnstrom regrets using those words, but the video can be endlessly replayed.

* "STEREOTYPE." YEAH. RIGHT. (*SNORT*) HEY... FOLKS... THE STUFF THE DEMS MUST HAVE IN RESERVE TO THROW AT ROMNEY... TO BREAK OUR SPIRIT BY SHOWING ROMNEY FOR WHO HE IS BY REFERRING TO WHO HE'S BEEN...

(*SIGH*)

March 21, 2012 at 7:17 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-20/jpmorgan-employees-join-goldman-sachs-among-top-obama-donors.html

President Barack Obama’s largest campaign donors last month included employees of Wells Fargo & Co., JPMorgan Chase & Co., and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., according to an analysis of Federal Election Commission records.

Their support indicates that Wall Street, which gave Obama $16 million for his successful 2008 White House run, is opening its checkbook again for the president.

Mitt Romney, a former Massachusetts governor and a co-founder of the Boston-based private equity firm Bain Capital LLC, has received strong support from Wall Street to fill his campaign coffers [as well]. He has received $6 of every $10 contributed to a presidential candidate by securities and investment industry employees and their families, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based research group that tracks campaign giving.

* DEMOCRATS... REPUBLICANS... (*SIGH*)... OLIGARCHS AND KLEPTOCRATS RUN BOTH PARTIES.

March 21, 2012 at 7:46 PM

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