Tuesday, April 2, 2013
Barker's Newsbites: Tuesday, April 2, 2013
The song...
The story...
And the reality is that from after the point where we drove the Taliban from power in Afghanistan and oversaw the installation of a new government, each life we've lost there has been a life squandered upon a political cause - not lost "defending America."
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* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324020504578396851274323598.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop
Bondholders, Beware
That headline more or less sums up the message of federal bankruptcy Judge Christopher Klein's decision on Monday to allow Stockton, California, to proceed with Chapter 9 bankruptcy.
The San Joaquin Valley city of 300,000 intends to use bankruptcy to stiff capital market creditors in order to pay for its workers' rich pensions, which will merely encourage other insolvent municipalities to do the same.
(*NOD*)
Stockton filed for bankruptcy last summer after a three-month confidential mediation with creditors failed to substantially reduce its long-term liabilities or close its $25 million deficit. Assured Guaranty and National Public Finance Guarantee, which insure about $260 million of the city's bond debt, pulled out of negotiations after the city council refused to haircut the city's single largest creditor, the California Public Employees' Retirement System (Calpers).
(*NOD*)
Meanwhile, the city was proposing to slash by 80% the $125 million in principal on pension obligation bonds that it had issued in 2007 to pay an overdue bill to Calpers.
(*SIGH*)
Never before has a bankrupt city reduced principal on its debt. In its Chapter 9 eligibility trial, Stockton nonetheless blamed bond insurers for negotiating in bad faith — an argument Judge Klein echoed in his ruling.
* ALWAYS REMEMBER, FOLKS... JUDGES ARE POLITICIANS.
The city claimed that its workers and residents had already paid their fair share, and now it was time for the capital creditors to chip in. Yet the most significant concessions from labor involved cutting bonus pay for things like handling a canine (which pays an extra 9%).
(*SNORT*)
Many of these fringe benefits and pay categories were incorporated in informal side letters with unions and never approved by the city council.
* AND YET... TAXPAYERS FUND THEM!
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)
Pensions for new workers were trimmed modestly, and the "Lamborghini" retiree health benefits — that's city council member Kathy Miller's description — entitling workers who had worked for merely six months to free lifetime medical are to be phased out.
* YEP... YOU READ THAT RIGHT!
Yet as city officials attested, all of these "concessions" have merely brought the city into line with comparable cities — which are also slouching toward bankruptcy because of public employee pay and benefits.
(*BEATING MY HEAD AGAINST THE WALL*)
The truth is that the only way Stockton can solve its financial problems in or outside of bankruptcy is to trim its $147 million unfunded pension liability. Pensions equal about 40% of its annual payroll costs. The average firefighter can retire at age 50 with an annuity equal to 90% of his highest year's salary, which until recently included various bonus pay categories, plus a cost-of-living adjustment.
* FOLKS... DO THE MATH...!!! THIS IS INSANITY...!!!
So even though the city has cut its workforce by roughly a third, it still faced a $25 million deficit last year. And even if it defaults on the $200 million it owes in principal and interest on its pension obligation bonds, it projects a $100 million deficit over the next decade. That will likely increase since Calpers recently approved a 50% rate hike in municipalities' pension bills to fill its own liabilities hole.
(*THROWING MY ARMS UP IN THE AIR*)
Calpers insists that pensions are contracts protected under state and federal law. When the Bay Area suburb of Vallejo filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy in 2008, Calpers threatened to tie the city up in court if it even tried to cut pensions. Never mind that the express purpose of bankruptcy is to break and restructure contracts. Stockton never sought to restructure pension benefits and never approached Calpers during mediation. Perhaps city officials figure union-dominated Calpers is too politically powerful to take on, but it's also true that their own pensions are at stake in any restructuring.
All of which leaves the city's bondholders as the likeliest targets.
(*NOD*)
Creditors who thought that lending to cities was a risk-free exercise are learning the ugly reality of modern public-union politics. Unions have the power, and their view is that their benefits are forever and your contracts are negotiable.
http://abcnews.go.com/ABC_Univision/press-drops-illegal-immigrant-standards-book/story?id=18862824#.UVs3hTcsmdf
The Associated Press, the largest news-gathering outlet in the world, will no longer use the term "illegal immigrant."
* BUT DON'T WORRY, FOLKS... I WILL!
* SERIOUSLY... ANYONE WHO DOESN'T BELIEVE ORWELL IS HERE...???
The news came in the form of a blog entry authored by Senior Vice President and Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll on Tuesday afternoon, explaining that the decision is part of the company's on-going attempt to rid their Stylebook of labels.
(*SNORT*)
* FOLKS... IN MANY WAYS "SELF-CENSORSHIP" IS MORE CHILLING THAN GOVERNMENT IMPOSED CENSORSHIP.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/apr/1/stimulus-funds-fed-minority-businesses-that-served/
WB Construction & Sons Inc. is a 10-employee, "minority-owned" firm that received $7.5 million in five stimulus contracts from the federal government, but it did not do close to that much work.
Every one of the stimulus contracts it received followed a pattern: Win a contract roped off for minority-owned businesses...
* WHICH SHOULDN'T EXIST!
...where only one other company put in a bid. Then pay Apeck Construction Inc., a non-minority business, to do the vast majority of the work, while keeping a 10 percent cut for itself.
(*SNORT*)
One might expect that nearly $8 million in construction projects would create jobs at WB. Instead, in keeping with its role seemingly as a pass-through that fills out paperwork rather than building, WB simply hired a new “office clerk.”
(*CLAP...CLAP....CLAP*)
An analysis by The Washington Times of contracting data found that large numbers of contracts awarded under President Obama’s $785 billion "stimulus" package were reserved for small businesses and minority-owned firms that merely took cuts as middlemen. Seventeen percent of contracts where bidding was restricted to minority-owned firms subcontracted the majority of the work to someone else, compared with 2% of companies that won small-business contracts and 6% that won bids open to anyone, The Times analysis found.
* HEY... FOLKS... THINK OF IT THIS WAY: CONGRESS IS CORRUPT, RIGHT? THE BLACK CAUCUS IS MORE CORRUPT THAN MOST OTHER CONGRESSIONAL CAUCUSES!
(*SMIRK*)
* YEAH... I JUST WENT THERE... EITHER CITE FIGURES THAT SHOW ME TO BE WRONG OR ELSE ACCEPT REALITY.
* FOLKS... (*SIGH*)... READ THE STORY. IT'S SICKENING. OUR GOVERNMENT IS INCOMPETENT AND CORRUPT. PERIOD.
* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/344426/new-climate-deniers-rich-lowry
There are few things sadder than the “climate denier.” She ignores the data and neglects the latest science. Her rhetoric and policy proposals are dangerously disconnected from reality. She can’t recalibrate to take account of the latest evidence because, well, she’s a denier.
(*WAGING MY FINGER*)
The new climate deniers are the liberals
(*HUGE FRIGGIN' GRIN*)
...who, despite their obsession with climate change, have managed to miss the biggest story in climate science, which is that there hasn’t been any global warming for about a decade and a half.
* YEP... FRIGGIN' AMAZING... AMAZING BUT TRUE! I KNOW THESE PEOPLE! BRIGHT... WELL-EDUCATED... BUT SO CAUGHT UP IN IDEOLOGY THAT REALITY DOESN'T STAND A CHANCE WITH THEM!
“Over the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar,” The Economist writes.
* THE... ECONOMIST...!!!
(*SNORT*)
“The world added roughly 100 billion tons of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO2 put there by humanity since 1750.” Yet, no more warming.
* OOPS...
(*ANOTHER SNORT*)
The Economist has been decidedly alarmist on global warming through the years, so it deserves credit for pausing to consider why the warming trend it expected to continue has mysteriously stalled out.
The deniers feel no such compunction. They speak as if it is still the late 1990s, when measurements of global temperature had been rising for two decades.
* TRUE... BUT OF COURSE EVEN THEN THERE WERE NUMEROUS "PROBLEMS" WITH HOW GLOBAL TEMPERATURES WERE BEING MEASURED... OR RATHER MISMEASURED... BUT PUTTING THAT ASIDE...
In his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama said that “we can choose to believe in the overwhelming judgment of science and act before it’s too late.” In a passage devoted to global warming, though, he didn’t mention the latest trend in global warming.
(*SMIRK*)
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)
A denier feels the same righteous sense of certitude now, when warming has stopped, as he did a decade ago.
* YEP...
(*EYES ROLLING*)
* THUS THE EYE ROLLING...
Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson recently opined that “sensible people accept the fact of warming” — but apparently not the fact of no-warming. He scorned those “who manipulate the data in transparently bogus ways to claim that warming has halted or even reversed course.” Does he include James Hansen, the famous NASA scientist, among these dastardly manipulators? No one this side of Al Gore has warned as persistently about global warming as Hansen. Hansen nonetheless admits that “the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade.”
* ONE... MORE... TIME:
Hansen nonetheless admits that “the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade.”
(*SHRUG*)
None of this means that the Earth didn’t get hotter in the 20th century, or that carbon emissions don’t tend to create a warmer planet, or that warming won’t necessarily begin again. It does mean that we know less about the fantastically complex global climate system than global-warming alarmists have been willing to admit.
(*NOD*)
The Economist notes the work of Ed Hawkins of the University of Reading in Britain. He has found that if global temperatures stay the same for a few more years, they will fall below the range of 20 climate models. In other words, the scientific “consensus” will have been proven wrong.
(*GRIN*)
Why the stall in warming?
According to The Economist, maybe we’ve overestimated the warming impact of clouds. Or maybe some clouds cool instead of warm the planet. Or maybe the oceans are absorbing heat from the atmosphere.
* S*U*N*S*P*O*T*S...!!!
Although the surface temperature of the oceans hasn’t been rising, perhaps the warming is happening deep down. James Hansen thinks new coal-fired plants in China and India, releasing so-called aerosols into the atmosphere that act to suppress warming, may be partly responsible for the stasis in temperatures.
* SO... POLLUTION IS GOOD... IF IT'S CHINESE AND INDIAN AEROSOL POLLUTION...???
(*SCRATCHING MY HEAD*)
Hansen writes that knowing more about the effect of aerosols on the climate “requires accurate knowledge of changes in aerosol amount, size distribution, absorption and vertical distribution on a global basis — as well as simultaneous data on changes in cloud properties to allow inference of the indirect aerosol forcing via induced cloud changes.”
Is that all?
(*GUFFAW*)
He ruefully notes that the launch of a satellite with a sensor to measure all of this failed, with no follow-up mission planned.
* GEEZUS...! AL GORE COULD FUND A LAUNCH ALL BY HIMSELF! COM'ON GANG...!!!
(*SNICKER*)
Hey, but don’t worry. The science is all “settled.”
(*LAUGHING SNICKER*)
What is beginning to seem more likely is that the “sensitivity” of the global climate to carbon emissions has been overestimated. If so, the deniers will be the last to admit it.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/344366/victims-fort-hood-shooting-denied-purple-hearts-john-fund
Political correctness crosses a line when it no longer conveys stupidity but pathetic weakness to our enemies.
Last Friday, the U.S. Army formally decided not to award Purple Heart medals to the victims of the 2009 Fort Hood shooting, which claimed 13 lives and wounded 32 people.
The Army preposterously claims that handing out medals would damage Major Nidal Hasan’s “ability to receive a fair trial.”
* HASAN SHOULD HAVE BEEN TRIED, CONVICTED, SENTENCED TO DEATH, AND EXECUTED WITHIN 6 WEEKS OF THE SHOOTING! (YA WANNA MAKE IT 6 MONTHS... FINE!)
The Army issued a “position paper” in which it expressed concern that awarding the medal to the shooting victims “would set the stage for a formal declaration that Major Hasan is a terrorist.” This is because the Purple Heart is awarded to those who have been “wounded or killed in any action against an enemy of the United States.”
But Hasan clearly was a terrorist.
A Muslim, he consulted with a radical overseas imam and shouted “Allahu Akbar” before beginning his deadly rampage.
The FBI and Congress have found his carnage to be an act of terrorism, while the Obama administration insists it was an incident of “workplace violence.”
Hasan faces the death penalty if he is convicted by a military jury on 13 specifications of premeditated murder. His court martial is set to begin in July.
* IN JULY... JULY 2013...
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
Neal Sher, a New York lawyer who represents the Fort Hood victims, called the Army’s findings “rubbish.” “These victims have been given the back of the hand by their government,” he claimed. I’ll go further. In its absurd ruling the Obama administration has given them a kick in the gut.
* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/marc-thiessen-betraying-one-of-the-cias-band-of-sisters/2013/04/01/52441310-9ad1-11e2-a941-a19bce7af755_story.html
Former CIA director Mike Hayden credits “an incredible band of sisters” for the success of the operation that found and brought down Osama bin Laden.
Now one of those sisters has been appointed acting chief of the CIA’s National Clandestine service.
It is a major milestone for women at the CIA, the first time in the agency’s history that a female officer has headed the clandestine service. But The Post reports that CIA Director John Brennan is “hesitating” at giving her the position on a permanent basis, because of her past association with the CIA’s rendition, detention and interrogation (RDI) program.
This is an outrage.
According to several former senior CIA officials I spoke with, the officer is highly respected and unquestionably qualified for this post. Denying her this promotion because of her role in the RDI program would not only be a personal injustice, but also send a chilling message through the ranks of the CIA. It would effectively tell hundreds of talented officers who were involved in the program — who constitute the best and brightest of the agency’s counter-terrorism professionals — that their careers over.
It would push the agency back into a risk-averse, pre-Sept. 11, 2001, mindset, sending an unmistakable signal to CIA officers across the world: Don’t take risks in the fight against the terrorists; if you want to advance, play it safe.
(*NOD*)
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)
These intelligence officers have already been put through hell by the Obama administration. They have been accused of “torture” by their own president.
* DOUCHE BAG!
They were investigated and cleared of criminal wrongdoing by career Justice Department prosecutors during the Bush administration, only to see Attorney General Eric Holder overrule those decisions and reopen the investigations. After enduring another three year ordeal, they were cleared a second time by the Obama Justice Department. Yet they continue to be persecuted for their service to our country.
The Post reported incorrectly that the officer in question “signed off on the 2005 decision to destroy videotapes of prisoners” undergoing enhanced interrogation. In fact, while she helped her then-boss, former clandestine service chief Jose Rodriguez, draft the cable ordering the tapes’ destruction, the decision was made by Rodriguez and Rodriguez alone.
As he put it in his outstanding memoir, “Hard Measures,” “this had been such an ordeal that I wanted to personally handle what I thought was the end of a long bureaucratic nightmare.”
Moreover, she was investigated not once but twice in the destruction of the tapes, and was cleared of any wrongdoing by both the Bush and Obama Justice Departments. Case closed.
Of all people, Brennan should be the last person holding up this officer’s appointment. When President Obama first took office, Brennan was passed over for the job of CIA director because of his past association with the interrogation program. He had been deputy executive director of the CIA when George Tenet established the program, and as head of the National Counterterrorism Center, he was one of the top consumers of the intelligence the program produced. For Brennan to deny this officer a deserved promotion for producing the intelligence he used — and continues to use today — would be a grave injustice.
Brennan understands the message that passing her over would send to the agency’s workforce. Already, some of the same civil liberties advocates who criticized the interrogation program are now gunning for the drone campaign that Brennan pioneered — demanding the release of legal memos justifying targeted killings, calling them illegal and immoral. The ACLU has sued to challenge what it calls “the unchecked authority to put the names of citizens and others on ‘kill lists’ on the basis of a secret determination, based on secret evidence.” The United Nations has appointed a “special rapporteur” to investigate the United States for alleged “war crimes” in the use of drones.
Should current CIA officers involved in the drone program that Obama uses to kill rather than interrogate terrorists refuse to participate because a future administration might decide it unwise or even illegal?
How can Brennan ask intelligence officers to take risks and lean forward in the drone campaign today, if he fails to stand by a respected officer who took risks and leaned forward after Sept. 11, 2001?
If you want your people to run toward the sound of the guns, you can’t shoot them in the back when they do.
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