Tuesday, February 18, 2014
Barker's Newsbites: Tuesday, February 18, 2014
Yep... been a few days...
Yep... read "Majority Interim Report: Benghazi Investigation Update" Total bullshit. Total cover-up. But, hey, don't take my word for it... read the report for yourself... note the subcommittee chair is a longtime Boehner loyalist who just "happens" to be retiring after his present term... note who hasn't been questioned under oath; folks, it's 31 pages including the title page and footnotes; read the report yourselves and if you fail to see what I see just contact me (post right here!) with questions and/or comments.
Anyway... on to newsbites!
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http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2014/02/18/jersey-city-tackles-snow-removal-as-nj-deals-with-salt-shortage/
The Garden State is still waiting for a critical supply of rock salt held up by the Department of Homeland Security since it is being carried on a foreign ship.
“The State of New Jersey has been among the hardest hit states this winter season, with more than 70 inches of snow accumulated in some parts of the state,” said Senators Robert Menendez and Cory Booker. “The Governor has issued at least four state of emergency alerts. Several cities and municipalities are reporting shortages of rock salt, which has the potential to endanger motorists and the general public in future snow events.”
New Jersey DOT Commissioner James Simpson says the salt shortage could force him to close major roadways during storms if a solution isn’t reached. DOT Spokesman Joe Dee said the state has used more than 370,000 tons of salt as of Feb. 11, before last Thursday’s storm. (That compares to 258,000 tons of salt used all of last winter.)
In Jersey City, officials have been waiting for about 3,000 tons of salt to arrive. (Simpson says the U.S. Department of Transportation told him it has found two barges that could carry a total of 15,000 tons to New Jersey in about three weeks.)
* THREE WEEKS...?!?!
State officials say a shipment of 40,000 tons of salt has been halted in Maine because a foreign-flagged vessel is carrying the salt. According to the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, ships carrying cargo between U.S. ports must be carried on U.S.- flagged ships. The New Jersey Department of Transportation filed a request with the DHS on Feb. 13 to waive the Merchant Marine Act of 1920 under the national security exception and allow a foreign-flagged vessel to deliver the salt.
“I am convinced that a waiver a couple of days ago would’ve had the salt here already, so the faster we get a waiver, the faster we get the salt,” New Jersey Assemblyman Jon Bramnick said. “I’m deeply troubled that there hasn’t been a waiver.”
* FUNNY HOW THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION IS QUICK TO ISSUE "WAIVERS" WHEN THERE'S NO "WAIVER AUTHORITY" WRITTEN INTO THE LAW... BUT NOW... ON THIS... WHEN THEY ACTUALLY HAVE WAIVER AUTHORITY... THEY REFUSE TO ACT.
* INCOMPETENCE...??? A BOW TO THE UNIONS...??? A BOW TO THE ENVIRONMENTALISTS...???
(*JUST SCRATCHING MY HEAD*)
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/feb/18/obama-orders-new-mileage-standards-big-rigs/
Linking increased fuel economy to the larger issue of economic growth, President Obama on Tuesday directed his administration to write new rules to improve mileage for the nation’s big-rig trucks.
* "RULES." WITH THE FORCE OF LAWS.
* FOLKS... ONE WORD: ETHANOL. HOW'S THAT GOING FOR YOU? YOUR GAS MILEAGE SUCKS IN THE WINTER, RIGHT? IN LARGE PART BECAUSE OF THE GOVERNMENT ETHANOL MANDATE!
* HEY... I'VE GOT AN IDEA - LET'S LET THE MARKET FIVE US THE RIGHT POWER vs. FUEL ECONOMY MIX. LET INDIVIDUALS AND BUSINESSES DECIDE WHAT SORT OF VEHICLES THEY SHOULD FAVOR!
Mr. Obama made the announcement during a speech at a suburban Maryland Safeway distribution center and cast it as the latest move in his so-called “year of action,” a time he’ll act without Congress wherever possible.
(*PURSED LIPS*)
“Improving gas mileage for these trucks is going to drive down our oil imports even further,” Mr. Obama said. “That reduces carbon pollution even more, cuts down on businesses’ fuel costs, which should pay off in lower prices for consumers. So it’s not just a win-win. It’s a win-win-win.”
* BLAH-BLAH-BLAH-BLAH...
* FOLKS... GAS WAS BACK UP TO $3.27 gal. IN NEW JERSEY THE OTHER DAY! UP FROM $3.15 gal. AT MY LAST FILL-UP. WHEN'S THE LAST TIME YOU'VE SEEN GAS UNDER $3 gal.? FOLKS... A "WIN" FOR ME WOULD BE BUSH-ERA GAS PRICES!
The president added, “The economy is growing. We’re creating jobs. We’re generating more clean energy. We’re cutting our dependence on foreign oil. We’re pumping out less dangerous carbon pollution. If we keep going down this road then we’re going to have a future full of good-paying jobs.”
* OH MY FRIGGIN' GOD... THE PERMANENT CAMPAIGN...
“Fuel is one of our industry’s largest expenses, so it makes sense that as an industry we would support proposals to use less of it,” said Bill Graves, president and CEO of the American Trucking Association. “However, we should make sure that new rules don’t conflict with safety or other environmental regulations, nor should they force specific types of technology onto the market before they are fully tested and ready.”
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/106-obama-has-more-doubled-marketable-us-debt
The marketable debt of the U.S. government has more than doubled - climbing by 106% - while President Barack Obama has been in office...
(*HEADACHE*)
...increasing from $5,749,916,000,000 at the end of January 2009 to $11,825,322,000,000 at the end of January 2014, according to the U.S. Treasury's latest Monthly Statement of the Public Debt.
During the eight-year presidency of George W. Bush, the marketable debt of the U.S. government almost doubled - climbing 93% - from $2,977,328,000,000 at the end of January 2001 to $5,749,916,000,000 at the end of January 2009.
* JUST BEAR IN MIND, FOLKS, BUSH HAD A DEMOCRATIC HOUSE AND SENATE FOR ONE-QUARTER OF HIS TIME IN OFFICE...
* WHAT DO YOU SUPPOSE THE NUMBERS WOULD SHOW IF WE COMPARED SPENDING IN THE YEARS REPUBLICANS CONTROLLED THE WHITE HOUSE AND BOTH HOUSES OF CONGRESS TO THE PERIOD DEMOCRATS CONTROLLED THE WHITE HOUSE AND BOTH HOUSES OF CONGRESS...???
During the time that Bush and Obama have been in office, the marketable debt of the U.S. government has nearly quadrupled, increasing by $8,847,994,000,000.
* RINOs AND DEMOCRATS, MY FRIENDS... RINOs AND DEMOCRATS...
(*SIGH*)
However, despite the massive increase in the government's marketable debt during Bush's eight years, Obama managed to accumulate more additional marketable debt in his first five years in office than all the presidents who preceded combined.
The marketable debt of the U.S. government includes all debt securities sold by the U.S. Treasury that can be held by individuals, corporations or other entities outside the U.S. government and that can be sold in the secondary market.
It does not include money the Treasury has borrowed out of government trust funds — such as the Social Security Trust Fund — to spend on other government expenses when those trust funds were running surpluses.
* STOLEN, FOLKS... THE WORD IS "STOLEN."
The Federal Reserve is now the largest owner of the U.S. government’s marketable debt. As of Feb. 12, 2014, according to the Fed’s latest balance sheet, the Fed owned $2,261,099,000,000 in U.S. Treasury securities.
Entities in the People’s Republic of China are the second largest owners of the U.S. government’s marketable debt.
As of the end of December, according to data released by the U.S. Treasury today, the Chinese owned $1,268,900,000,000 in U.S. Treasury securities — down from $1,316,700,000,000 at the end of November.
http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2014/02/18/DOD-Stuck-Flawed-15-Trillion-Fighter-Jet
On CBS’s “60 Minutes” on Sunday night, national security correspondent David Martin chronicled the seemingly never-ending list of problems with the Pentagon’s next-generation F-35 fight jet, from cost overruns of $160 billion to technical problems that have plagued the plane’s development.
* WERE WE A SANE NATION, THOSE RESPONSIBLE FOR COST OVERRUNS OF $160 BILLION WOULD BE IDENTIFIED AND PUNISHED!
When asked if the F-35 program, which is expected to cost some $1.5 trillion over the four-decade life of the program, is now under control, the Pentagon’s acquisition chief, Frank Kendall, said, "Yes, it is."
* HE'S FULL OF SHIT.
But that commitment came with a warning. “Long gone is the time when we're going to pay for mistake after mistake after mistake," said Lt. Gen. Christopher Bogdan, the officer who took control of the F-35 program last year. He added that the planes are necessary, however, to keep pace with the technology being developed by U.S. rivals Russia and China. “I don't see any scenario where we are walking back away from this program. We're going to buy a lot of these airplanes,” said Bogdan.
DOD is so far down the F-35 rabbit hole, both in terms of technology and cost - $400 billion for 2,400 planes - that it has no choice but to continue with the program. Still, it’s not too far gone to send a message to the plane’s manufacturer, Lockheed Martin. A report in The Washington Post about DOD’s 2015 fiscal request says the Pentagon needs funds to purchase two of the Navy’s version of the plane, six of the Marines,’ and 26 of the Air Force’s model. It’s a sizable order, but it’s actually eight planes less than the 42 originally expected. In the scheme of things, eight fewer jets among an order of 2,400 is not a big drop. But the timing of the leak to the Post, as well as the admonishment to Lockheed on “60 Minutes,” is hard to dismiss as mere coincidence.
Lockheed did not comment on camera on the “60 Minutes” report.
Lockheed and DOD have been squabbling over F-35 problems for years. In October, a DOD Inspector General report found 719 problems with the plane and said “Lockheed's failure to make sure subcontractors' work was not up to snuff.” Lockheed countered that the problems were not new and that they were “based on data that's more than 16 months old and [a] majority of the Corrective Action Requests identified have been closed.”
“Producing quality products is a top priority for the F-35 program, and Lockheed Martin and its suppliers strive every day to deliver the best aircraft possible to our customers," Lockheed said in a statement at the time. “When discoveries occur, we take decisive and thorough action to correct the situation. Our commitment is to deliver the F-35's world class Fifth Generation fighter capabilities to the warfighter on time and within budget.”
* AND YET... "...cost overruns of $160 billion..." (THAT'S JUST SO FAR...)
It seems as if DOD is attempting to send another message with Sunday night’s broadcast and the news that orders are expected to be cut in 2015. This isn’t just a cost issue any more, either – DOD needs the plane to work in order to maintain air superiority.
* NO DOUBT THE GOVERNMENT IS THE SOURCE OF MANY OF THE PROBLEMS...
* FOLKS... I'VE BEEN SAYING FOR AS LONG AS THE F-35 CONCEPT HAS EXISTED THAT IT WAS A BAD IDEA... A POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC "COMPROMISE" THAT WOULD LEAD TO LESS BANG FOR THE BUCK RATHER THAN MORE BANG FOR THE BUCK.
* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/371383/only-under-holder-robert-delahunty-john-yoo
Chalk up yet one more legal fiasco to Attorney General Eric Holder.
Apart from failing to enforce ObamaCare, immigration, and the drug laws, the administration continues to endanger national security with its catch-and-release approach to terrorists. In a preview of the consequences of its plans to close Guantanamo Bay, the Obama Justice department (DOJ) is starting to apprehend terrorists abroad and free them at home.
The story begins with the 2011 arrest of Ali Mohamed Ali, who took part in the pirate attack on a Danish vessel, the CEC Future, off the northern coast of Somalia three years earlier. Ali acted as a translator for the pirates and communicated their demands to the vessel’s owner, Clipper Group. After two months of holding the ship and its crew of 13 captive, the pirates eventually released them in exchange for a ransom of $1.7 million. The ransom payment was dropped onto the vessel by helicopter. As part of its efforts to suppress piracy, including the stationing of a naval task force off East Africa, the United States eventually captured Ali.
For centuries, international law has considered pirates to be the ultimate war criminals and “enemies of all mankind.” As a crime of “universal jurisdiction,” piracy can be punished by any nation. But there is no requirement that it be tried in the civilian courts. Piracy is inherently a warlike enterprise, and in its present form off the Somali coast it has reached higher levels of violence than some wars do. In 2008, the year in which the CEC Future was taken captive, pirates seized 49 ships and held nearly 900 crew members for ransom worldwide. Somali pirates were responsible for 111 attacks that year. Although the incidence of Somali piracy has dropped since peaking in 2011, it is still a serious menace.
But this administration, trapped by the ideology of its anti-war base, had no idea what to do with Ali.
* YOU HANG HIM! HE'S A PIRATE!
The Obama administration refuses to send any new detainees to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, because it cannot bring itself to admit agreement with Bush-era anti-terrorism policies. Instead, it prefers to kill terrorist leaders (and nearby civilians) with drone strikes rather than capturing them to gain intelligence. As a result, the Obama administration has failed to capture a single high-ranking terrorist leader in five years, and the most valuable pool of information — human intelligence — is drying up.
Out of options, Holder began the sad comedy of errors by bringing Ali back to the United States. Consistent with Holder’s preferred policy of trying suspected terrorists in ordinary civil courts inside the United States, rather than before military commissions, federal prosecutors put Ali on trial in a federal district court in Washington, D.C. The most important charge against him was piracy, which on conviction carries a mandatory life sentence. Lesser charges included hostage taking.
Prosecutors compounded Holder’s basic mistake by failing last November to persuade the jury to convict Ali.
(*HEADACHE*)
Obama’s DOJ then brought its bungling to new heights by deciding to drop the remaining charges against Ali.
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)
Having gotten a read on the men across the table, Ali has called the administration and now raised it — by applying for permanent asylum in the United States. The chances are excellent that Ali will remain inside the United States for a prolonged stay or even the rest of his life.
* AT TAXPAYER EXPENSE!
This is not the first time that Holder’s DOJ has sought to try such cases in ordinary civil courts inside the country, rather than at Guantanamo Bay, where military commissions for trying terrorists are available. Earlier in the Obama administration, Holder sought a civil criminal trial for Khalid Sheik Mohammed and other suspects involved in the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. But Holder had no answer to questions about what would happen if a jury failed to convict these al-Qaeda suspects. He said merely, “I would not have authorized the prosecution of these cases unless I was confident that our outcome would be a successful one.”
In other words, Holder acknowledged that he had no Plan B.
But despite Holder’s presumptuousness, federal prosecutors cannot control jury deliberations or predict their outcomes with certainty. Once a case has gone to the jury, it is for the jurors alone to decide whether to find that the accused has been proven guilty or not.
The public blowback against trying terrorists inside the United States was intense and bipartisan, and the White House retreated from Holder’s plan under fire. But this administration is not one to admit to or learn from its mistakes. In the Ali case, Holder and his subordinates took the risk that they might not succeed in convincing a jury that Ali was himself a pirate because he had provided translation services to a pirate gang. Their gamble backfired when the jury reported its verdict.
What happened makes plain the original wisdom behind military commissions.
From the Revolution to World War II, American commanders convened these special military courts to try the enemy for war crimes. George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt ordered the use of commissions as part of their responsibility to punish enemy transgressions and to encourage compliance with the rules of civilized warfare. They combine speedy proceedings unencumbered by the years of delay in the peacetime justice system with judges and juries drawn from the officer corps who are specialists in the laws of war. In a WW-II decision, Ex Parte Quirin, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld FDR’s choice of military commission to try German spies captured on a sabotage mission within the United States, even though at least one of the defendants may have been born in the country.
* THE ONE BORN HERE SHOULD HAVE BEEN GIVEN HIS FULL CIVIL RIGHTS UPON DEMAND. (WE HAD HIM DEAD TO RIGHTS ON TREASON!)
But committed to its base’s dislike of Bush anti-terrorism policies, the Obama administration has forsworn the detention of terrorists at Guantanamo Bay and trial by military tribunals. Instead, Holder may have assumed that even if Ali were not convicted, he could be deported from the country as an illegal alien. But our immigration laws permit aliens inside the United States to apply for asylum — even if they have been brought into the country to stand trial.
* FUCKING MORON HOLDER...
Ali has taken advantage of that opportunity. In all likelihood, his asylum application will take months, if not years, to process. And in the end, he may even prevail. Other terrorists will take note: Even if their plots in the U.S. fail, they can always try their luck with a jury trial and then file for citizenship.
* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/371310/failure-obamas-aristocracy-merit-michael-barone
The roots of American liberalism are not compassion, but snobbery. That’s the thesis of Fred Siegel’s revealing new book, The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class.
The standard account from liberal historians over the years, and more recently in bestsellers by Glenn Beck, is a linear story: Government expansion starts with the Progressives of a hundred years ago, accelerates through the New Deal and the Great Society, and is followed up by the Obama stimulus and ObamaCare.
Siegel says it’s more complicated than that. And he argues that literary figures contributed as much to the liberal mindset — maybe more — than public-policy wonks.
He depicts the Progressives as Protestant reformers, determined to professionalize institutions and tame the immigrant and industrial masses. Progressive projects included women’s suffrage and the prohibition of alcohol.
But the many pro-German Progressives were appalled when Woodrow Wilson led America into World War I and by Wilson’s brutal suppression of civil liberties.
Progressivism was repudiated in the landslide election of Warren Harding in 1920, at which point disenchanted liberal thinkers turned their ire against middle-class Americans who, in the “Roaring ’20s,” were happily buying automobiles, refrigerators, radios, and tickets to the movies.
The novels of Sinclair Lewis, the journalism of H. L. Mencken, and the literary criticism of Van Wyck Brooks heaped scorn on the vast and supposedly mindless Americans who worked hard at their jobs and joined civic groups — Mencken’s “booboisie.” These 1920s liberals idealized the “noble aspiration” and “fine aristocratic pride” in an imaginary Europe, and considered Americans, in the words of a Lewis character, “a savorless people, gulping tasteless food,” and “listening to mechanical music, saying mechanical things about the excellence of Ford automobiles, and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world.”
This contempt for ordinary Americans mostly persisted in changing political environments. During the Great Depression, many liberals became Communists, proclaiming themselves tribunes of a virtuous oppressed proletariat that would have an enlightened rule. For a moment, idealization of the working man, but not the middle-class striver, came into vogue. But in the postwar years, what Siegel calls “the political and cultural snobbery” of liberals returned.
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)
Siegal recounts the derision of historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and economist John Kenneth Galbraith — Cambridge neighbors after the war — for Harry Truman, the onetime haberdasher and member of veterans’ groups and service clubs. (They failed to note that Truman was a serious reader of history and had, in supposedly backward Independence, Mo., studied piano under a teacher who had studied under Ignacy Paderewski.)
The supposedly mindless 1950s, Siegel recalls, were actually a time of elevated culture, with thousands of Great Books discussion groups across the nation and high TV ratings for programs such as Shakespeare’s Richard III, starring Laurence Olivier.
Liberals since the 1920s have claimed to be guided by the laws of science, but often it was crackpot science, like the eugenics movement that sought forced sterilizations. Predictions that the world would run out of food and resources turned out to be wrong. In the 1970s, people were told global cooling was inevitable. Now it’s global warming.
* OR AS THEY'VE HASTILY RENAMED IT... "CLIMATE CHANGE."
Other social-science theories proved unreliable in practice. Keynesian economics crashed and burned in the stagflation of the 1970s.
* KEYNESIAN ECONOMCS AS PRACTICED ARE RARELY ACTUALLY KEYNESIAN IN THE TRUE "KYNES" SENSE.
As Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an artist among social scientists, pointed out, social scientists didn’t really know how to eliminate poverty or crime. Policies based on middle-class instincts often worked better than those of elite liberals. The Obama Democrats passed a stimulus package tilted toward public-sector unions and financial regulation propping up the big banks. Those at the top got paid off.
Less has gone to those at the bottom.
Those in the middle have seen their health insurance canceled by ObamaCare and sit waiting for HealthCare.gov to function.
In 2008, Obama carried those with incomes under $50,000 and over $200,000, and lost those in between.
(*SIGH*)
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