Great... just friggin' great...
Folks... this has not been a good November!
Looking on the bright side... I did "discover" a "new" restaurant last night - Prime 15 Steak House and Grill!
Yep... even with the world seemingly crashing in around me... a man's still gotta eat... still gotta take the wife and "the kids" out to dinner!
Anyway... on to newsbiting!
(Newsbites can be found within the comments section!)
8 comments:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323713104578131473896462266.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinion
What happened in the recent election?
White men voted for Mr. Romney 62% to 35%, and white women voted 56% to 42%.
Blacks suppported Mr. Obama 93% to 6%, and Latinos 71% to 27%.
Voters earning less than $50,000 a year voted for Mr. Obama 60% to 38% while those with higher incomes voted for Romney 53% to 45%.
Democrats voted for Obama 92% to 7% and Republicans for Romney 93% to 6%.
Mr. Romney, unlike John McCain, won with independents. But that was not enough to win in 2012 because the Democrats did a better job getting their vote out.
State ballot issues can also tell us a good bit about our nation. In California, Gov. Jerry Brown's Prop 30, a $6 billion tax increase, won with 54% of the vote. In Florida, voters rejected a ballot item that would have limited spending increases to the rates of inflation plus population growth. Both were victories for public-sector unions and others who favor larger state government.
For the first time, advocates for same-sex marriage won at the ballot box. Maryland, Maine and Washington state all legalized it by referendum or initiative, and Minnesota voters rejected an amendment that would have written the traditional definition of marriage into the state constitution. That brings the number of states where gay couples can marry to nine.
And, there was a big pot vote in some states. Measures allowing recreational pot use passed in Colorado and Washington state but failed in Oregon.
Looking back on America's experience after World War II, the results of the recent election, and the challenges faced in Washington, it is obvious our country has become more liberal. Yes, we had Ronald Reagan, but we also had Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson and Jimmy Carter. And now, we have Mr. Obama, the most liberal of them all, elected to a second term. The truth is that the American ship is headed across the ocean toward Europe, aiming to become more like France, Italy and Greece.
Those who worry about the Europeanization of America, and the related economic and social decline are right to be unsettled.
FOUR-PARTER... (Part 1 of 4)
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/333928/failures-intelligence-mark-steyn
Let us turn from the post-Thanksgiving scenes of inflamed mobs clubbing each other to the ground for a discounted [manufactured abroad] television set to the comparatively placid boulevards of the Middle East.
In Cairo, no sooner had Hillary Clinton’s plane cleared Egyptian air space than Mohamed Morsi issued one-man constitutional amendments declaring himself and his Muslim Brotherhood buddies free from judicial oversight and announced that his predecessor, Hosni Mubarak, would be retried for all the stuff he was acquitted of in the previous trial.
Morsi now wields total control over parliament, the judiciary, and the military to a degree Mubarak in his jail cell can only marvel at.
* AND TO THOSE WHO INSIST THAT THE EGYPTIAN MILITARY IS STILL A FORCE SEPARATE AND APART - AND ULTIMATELY, AT LEAST IN WHEN PUSH COMES TO SHOVE, SUPERIOR TO - MORSI AND THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD, I CAUTION YOU TO LOOK AT TURKEY... PARTICULARLY THE DEVOLUTION OF STAND-ALONE/STAND-APART "SECULAR, PRO-WESTERN" MILITARY PRIMACY AS IT ONCE APPLIED (BUT NO LONGER DOES) IN THAT COUNTRY AND TO THAT CULTURE.
Old CIA wisdom: He may be an SOB but he’s our SOB.
New post–Arab Spring CIA wisdom: He may be an SOB but at least he’s not our SOB.
(*SNORT*)
But don’t worry. As America’s director of national intelligence, James Clapper, assured the House Intelligence Committee at the time of Mubarak’s fall, the Muslim Brotherhood is a “largely secular” organization.
* HA! HA! HA! HA! HA!
The name’s just for show, same as the Episcopal Church.
(*RUEFUL CHUCKLE*)
Which brings us to Intelligence Director Clapper’s fellow intelligence director, General Petraeus.
(*ROLLING MY EYES*)
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONTINUING...
Don’t ask me why there’s a director of national intelligence and a director of central intelligence. Something to do with 9/11, after which the government decided it could use more intelligence.
(*SNORT*)
Instead it wound up with more directors of intelligence, which is the way it usually goes in Washington.
(*SMIRK*)
Anyway, I blow hot and cold on the Petraeus sex scandal. Initially, it seemed the best shot at getting a largely uninterested public to take notice of the national humiliation and subsequent cover-up over the deaths of American diplomats and the sacking of our consulate in Benghazi.
* DIDN'T HAPPEN...
(*SIGH*)
Instead, we’ll “investigate” it for a year or three, as we’re doing with Benghazi itself.
(*SOMBER NOD*)
At her press conference the other day, soon-to-be Secretary of State Susan Rice explained that she would be misspeaking if she were to explain why she misspoke about Benghazi until something called the “Accountability Review Board” has finished “conducting investigations” into “all aspects” of the investigations being conducted, which should be completed by roughly midway through Joe Biden’s second term.
Pending that “definitive accounting,” one or two aspects stand out:
Paula Broadwell had access to General Petraeus because she was supposedly writing his biography.
As it turns out, she can’t write, so her publisher was obliged to hire a ghostwriter from the Washington Post.
Some years ago, at a low point in my career, I was asked to ghostwrite a book for a supermodel. That’s usually the type of “writer” who requires a ghost: models, singers, athletes, celebrities. When a first-time biographer requires a ghostwriter, that person is not a biographer but something else. Yet she had classified documents at her home - and yes, as the president suggested, they’re probably not that classified, not the real top-secret stuff. But in a speech at the University of Denver Mrs. Broadwell appeared to reveal accidentally that she is privy to operational knowledge of illegal CIA interrogation chambers in Benghazi.
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONTINUING...
Now let us move from General Petraeus’s mistress to General Allen’s non-mistress, Tampa socialite and identical twin Jill Kelley.
Mrs. Kelley had clearance for all parts of the MacDill Air Base and was given some kind of commemorative certificate as “honorary ambassador” to CentCom, on the basis of which, in a recent 9-1-1 call, she claimed the right to “diplomatic protection.”
Yeah, that’s what Chris Stevens thought in Benghazi.
As appears to be well known, the Kelleys have financial problems and their luxury home faces foreclosure.
For a while they ran a charity, the Doctor Kelley Cancer Foundation, which makes terminal cancer patients’ final wishes come true. In 2007, they took in $157,284 in donations, and ran up expenses of $81,927 on dining, entertainment, and travel. So, if you’ve got cancer and your dying wish is for Jill Kelley to party, this is the charity for you.
In other words, neither of these women pass the smell test.
(*SIGH*)
Which is a problem insofar as Petraeus, as CIA director, is supposed to be head of the national smell test, and General Allen, as Petraeus’s successor in Kabul, is supposed to be head of the smell test in Afghanistan.
* IT'S... NOT... FUNNY...
* FOLKS. STEYNE KNOWS IT'S NOT FUNNY. HE EMPLOYS SATIRE AND SNARK WITH GREAT EFFECT, BUT AT THE END OF THE DAY... THE POINTS HE'S RAISING ARE DEADLY SERIOUS. (OR AT LEAST THEY WOULD BE TAKEN THUS IF WE WERE STILL A SERIOUS PEOPLE.)
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (*Part 4 of 4)
In the Gaza “peace agreement” signed last week, they flew in Hillary Clinton to give the impression that she had something to do with it, whereas in reality she was entirely peripheral to the deal. But Jill Kelley is apparently essential to anything that matters in CentCom: When Pastor Terry Jones was threatening to burn a Koran, General Allen asked Mrs. Kelley to mediate[!]
When radio personality Bubba the Love Sponge was threatening to “deep-fat fry” a Koran, General Allen recommended the mayor of Tampa ask Mrs. Kelley to intervene.
The U.S. government is responsible for 43% of the planet’s military spending, and apparently all that gets you is that, when the feces hits the fan, the four-star brass start e-mailing Jill Kelley of Tampa[!].
(If only she’d been hosting a champagne reception at the Sigonella air base in southern Italy, maybe we could have parachuted her into Benghazi to defuse the situation.)
Jill is the woman Hillary can only dream of being... at the confluence of all the great geostrategic currents of the age.
Why didn’t we fly Jill Kelley to broker the Gaza deal? Instead of a patsy peddling risible talking points like Susan Rice, why can’t we have Jill Kelley as secretary of state?
As far as I can tell, our enemies in Afghanistan don’t go in for Soviet-style honey traps. Which is just as well, considering the ease with which, say, a pretend biographer can wind up sitting next to the U.S. commander on his personal Gulfstream. In different ways, Director Petraeus’s judgment and Director Clapper’s obtuseness testify to the problems of America’s vast, sprawling, over-bureaucratized intelligence community. If Director Petraeus can’t see the obvious under his nose in his interventions in the Kelley twins’ various difficulties, why would you expect Director Clapper to have any greater grasp of what’s happening in Cairo or Damascus?
* FOLKS... (*SIGH*)... THIS COUNTRY IS WELL AND TRULY FUCKED...
Having consolidated his grip in Egypt, Morsi is now looking beyond. His “peace deal” legitimizes the Muslim Brotherhood’s affiliate in Gaza, and increases the likelihood of the Brothers advancing to power in Syria and elsewhere. As on that night in Benghazi when the most lavishly funded military/intelligence operation on the planet watched for eight hours as a mob devoured America’s emissaries, America in a broader sense is a spectator in its own fate.
As for Afghanistan, it seems a fitting comment on America’s longest unwon war that the last two U.S. commanders exit in a Benny Hill finale, trousers round their ankles, pursued to speeded-up chase music by bunny-boiling mistresses, stalker socialites, identical twins, and Bubba the Love Sponge.
* FOLKS... IT'S NOT FUNNY... BUT IT IS REALITY... AMERICA 2012...
* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/11/24/the-unanswered-question-what-about-clinton-era-spending-rates.html
In the debate on our fiscal crisis, one crucial question is never answered or even asked: if we’re supposed to go back to Clinton-era tax rates because they were good for America, why don’t we simultaneously return to that era’s spending rates?
* BULLSHIT. I CALL FOR SPENDING CUTS CONSTANTLY. ALWAYS HAVE! SO DO ALL REAL TEA PARTIERS AND FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH, MOST REPUBLICANS. HELL... PLENTY OF DEMOCRATS CALL FOR LOWER GOVERNMENT SPENDING AS WELL.
* SO... NOW THAT I'VE DEALT WITH THE FALSE PREMISE - AT LEAST AS IT APPLIES TO MANY CITIZENS - LET'S ADDRESS THE UNDERLYING TRUTH THAT MOST POLITICIANS ARE UNWILLING TO MAKE THE CUTS THAT NEED TO BE MADE.
In arguing for a return to Clinton-era tax rates for wealthy households, with a top marginal rate of 39.6% rather than the Bush-era 35%, President Obama suggests that Slick Willy cooked up precisely the right recipe for growth and prosperity. ... But by addressing only the taxing part of the equation and not the spending levels, Democrats leave out the most important element in the winning formula.
* FOLKS... I KNOW I SOUND LIKE A BROKEN RECORD, BUT TALKING ABOUT MARGINAL TAX RATES UNDER THE PRESENT FEDERAL INCOME TAX CODE IS A LOSING PROPOSITION. WE NEED TO FIX THE BROKEN TAX CODE. PERIOD. TINKERING WITH THE RATES AND SOME LOOPHOLES ABSENT TRUE FUNDAMENTAL CHANGE WILL ONLY FURTHER CONFUSE THE SITUATION.
[E]ven if we went back to the "good old days" of Clinton taxation levels but maintained our current rates of spending, we’d suffer from devastating deficits of close to $1 trillion each year.
* EXACTLY.
* AGAIN, THOUGH... BEYOND THIS... WE'D STILL BE STUCK WITH A DYSFUNCTIONAL TAX SYSTEM FULL OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES!
According to official government figures, the feds collected revenues totaling 20.6% of the gross domestic product in 2000, the final full year of Clinton’s term. Under Obama in 2012, however, Washington spent money at a near-record rate of 24.3% of the GDP. Even with all of Clinton’s tax revenues, that still would have left a deficit of 3.7% of GDP, significantly higher even than the worst full year of the much-reviled George W. Bush.
* EXACTLY!
* PLUS... WHO SAYS THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT SHOULD COLLECT 20.6% OF GNP...?!?! MAYBE THE FIGURE SHOULD BE 17%... PERHAPS 15%...
* FOLKS... AGAIN... A FUNDAMENTAL ISSUE NO ONE EXCEPT ME SEEMS INTERESTED IN ADDRESSING IS THE PHILOSOPHICAL QUESTION OF HOW TO APPORTION "GOVERNMENT'S" SHARE OF GNP IN A FEDERAL REPUBLIC! WOULDN'T IT MAKE SENSE FOR THE BULK OF ONE'S TAXES TO GO TO ONE'S LOCALITY... NEXT PRIORITY ONE'S COUNTY... NEXT PRIORITY ONE'S STATE... AND THE WE DECIDE WHAT'S "FAIR" FOR THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT TO DEMAND...???
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)
[T]o reach Clinton-era revenue levels, Congress and the president would need to let all the Bush-era tax cuts expire, not just erasing breaks that benefit the wealthy. Yearly tax burdens for a typical, middle-class family earning $50,000 a year would increase $3,700, a development leaders of both parties consider utterly unacceptable.
* BECAUSE OF THE SPENDING...!!!
And all those punishing payments by hard-working, stressed-out Americans would still leave us with dangerous, damaging levels of deficit spending.
* BECAUSE OF THE SPENDING...!!!
To put the situation in perspective, federal spending went up from 18.2% of the economy in the last year of the Clinton administration, to 20.8% in the last full year of the Bush administration, to 24.3% of the just-completed fiscal year.
In raw dollar terms, the Clinton government shelled out an even $2 trillion for all federal programs. The Obama administration is lavishing $3.2 trillion in constant dollars even before its costly health-care reform takes effect.
* DO... YOU... UNDERSTAND...?!?!
Meanwhile, revenues declined at almost exactly the same rate as federal spending increased, going from 20.6% at the end of Clinton’s reign, to 17.6% in the final year of Bush, to an appalling 15.8 percent at the end of Obama’s first four years
* AND YET... A MAJORITY OF "WE THE PEOPLE" JUST GAVE OBAMA AN "ATABOY" AND RE-ELECTED HIM!
Washington has increased its share of the national economy by a frightening 34% since Slick Willy left office. It’s not possible to blame all of that on Bush’s two costly wars or his prescription drug benefit, as Obama increased federal spending as a share of GDP far more rapidly than did Bush.
* AND... THE ONLY PROBLEM THAT DEMOCRATS HAD WITH BUSH'S PRESCRIPTION DRUG BENEFIT WAS THAT IT WASN'T LARGER...!!!
* AS TO THE WARS... THE DEMS WENT ALONG WITH THEM! WHEN THE DEMS TOOK OVER CONGRESS IN JANUARY OF 2007 THEY CONTINUED TO FUND THEM...!!!
Which brings us back to the question neither Democrats nor Republicans seem willing to confront as they contemplate budgetary disaster and the dreaded fiscal cliff: If it’s appropriate to consider reinstating Clinton-era rates of taxation, why should it be unthinkable to restore Clinton era patterns of spending?
http://reason.com/reasontv/2012/11/23/3-reasons-to-kill-the-dept-of-homeland-s
Sunday, November 25, 2012 marks the 10th anniversary of the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which pulled together nearly two dozen federal agencies and departments under the control of new, single entity.
(*SARCASTIC CLAP-CLAP-CLAP*)
Its responsibilities include running the US Border Patrol, the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, and FEMA.
(*ROLLING MY EYES*)
DHS is the third biggest cabinet agency...
Here are three reasons to get rid of DHS:
1) It’s unnecessary. In the months immediately following September 11 attacks in 2001, President George W. Bush initially resisted calls to create a new high-level bureaucracy that would be laid on top of current activities. He was right to recognize that coordinating existing agencies would have been smarter and better. Unfortunately, he caved in to pressure to create a massive new department.
* YEP! A--HOLE! I TOLD HIM... I OPPOSED TSA... I OPPOSED HOMELAND SECURITY... BUT THEY DIDN'T LISTEN...
2) It’s ineffective. To read the titles of Government Accountability Office (GAO) analyses of Homeland Security is to be reminded constantly that DHS is never quite on top of its game. Recent reports include “DHS Requires More Disciplined Investment Management to Help Meet Mission Needs,” “DHS Needs Better Project Information and Coordination Among Four Overlapping Grant Programs,” and “Agriculture Inspection Program Has Made Some Improvements, But Management Challenges Persist.”
(*SNORT*)
3) It’s expensive. Last year, Homeland Security spent a whopping $60 billion, a figure that will doubtlessly increase in coming years. The construction of its new headquarters – the single-largest project ever undertaken by The General Services Administration – will cost at least $4 billion and is already years behind on schedule since breaking ground in 2009.
(*BANGING MY HEAD ON THE DESK TOP*)
Since it’s the holiday season, here’s a bonus reason to get rid of the Department of Homeland Security: It also runs the Transportation Security Administration, whose nasty reputation for manhandling innocent travelers is only slightly more annoying than its massive and undeserved growth in personnel and cost over the past decade.
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