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2014
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March
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- Weekend Newsbites: Sat. & Sun., March 29 & 30, 2014
- Barker's Newsbites: Thursday, March 27, 2014
- Barker's Newsbites: Wednesday, March 26, 2014
- Barker's Newsbites: Tuesday, March 25, 2014
- Barker's Newsbites: Monday, March 24, 2014
- Weekend Newsbites: Sat. & Sun., March 22 & 23, 2014
- Barker's Newsbites: Friday, March 21, 2014
- Barker's Newsbites: Tuesday, March 18, 2014
- Weekend Newsbites: Sat. & Sun., March 15 & 16, 2014
- Barker's Newsbites: Thursday, March 13, 2014
- Barker's Newsbites: Wednesday, March 12, 2014
- Barker's Newsbites: Monday, March 10, 2014
- New Tires...
- Barker's Newsbites: Friday, March 7, 2014
- Barker's Newsbites: Wednesday, March 5, 3024
- If You Read Nothing Else This Week... READ THIS!
- Barker's Newsbites: Tuesday, March 4, 2014
- I Have No Problem With Vladamir Putin!
- F--k You, Chris Christie!
- Weekend Newsbites: Sunday, March 2, 2014
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March
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About Me
- William R. Barker
- Pearl River, NY High School Class of '81; Northeastern University, Boston, MA Class of '87.
10 comments:
http://dailycaller.com/2014/03/15/ex-bush-admin-official-internet-giveaway-weakens-cybersecurity-opens-door-to-web-tax/
The U.S. Commerce Department announced late Friday it would relinquish control of The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) — the organization charged with managing domain names, assigning Internet protocol addresses and other crucial Web functions — after its current contract expires next year.
In response to months of mounting criticism from the global community over sweeping National Security Surveillance programs leaked by former agency contractor Edward Snowden, the Obama administration surrendered to allegations [that the United States] had too much influence over the Web through ICANN, which designates the roadmap from web-connected devices to websites and servers across the globe.
“U.S. management of the internet has been exemplary and there is no reason to give this away — especially in return for nothing,” former Bush administration State Department senior advisor Christian Whiton told The Daily Caller. “This is the Obama equivalent of Carter’s decision to give away the Panama Canal — only with possibly much worse consequences.” The U.S. government’s plan to give away authority over the Internet’s core architecture to the “global Internet community” could endanger the security of both the Internet and the U.S. — and open the door to a global tax on Web use.
“While the Obama administration says it is merely removing federal oversight of a non-profit, we should assume ICANN would end up as part of the United Nations,” Whiton said. “If the U.N. gains control what amounts to the directory and traffic signals of the Internet, it can impose whatever taxes it likes. It likely would start with a tax on registering domains and expand from there.”
The greater danger posed by the giveaway lies with the security of the Internet itself. While the U.S. has never used ICANN in a war or crisis situation, the potential exists for it to obstruct Internet commerce or deter foreign cyber attacks – powerful tools in the globalized information age.
“Under invariably incompetent U.N. control, it could mean a hostile foreign power disabling the Internet for us,” Whiton said.
http://media.hoover.org/sites/default/files/documents/201402-Eikenberry.pdf
There are a set of issues that if not satisfactorily resolved may threaten U.S. economic competitiveness, diminish the attractiveness of American
ideology, institutions, and society, and eventually limit the nation’s ability to field adequate military forces. These problems include:
Fiscal: In the short- to medium-term, the risk is of a sell-off of foreign holdings of U.S. bonds (foreigners control over half of the U.S. bond market and one-fifth of the corporate debt market) and a diminution of American power that obtains from the dollar serving as the world currency.
There is a related risk, in the longer-term, of unsustainable increases in health care and retirement transfer payments, in some scenarios pushing federal debt as a share of GDP from 73% in 2012 to 200% in 2037, inevitably crowding out future investments in human and material capital.
Education: In making a case that America is losing its traditional competitive edge in the field of education, the Council on Foreign Relations Independent Task Force Report on U.S. Education Reform and National Security described the relevance of education to national security: “Human capital will determine power in the current century, and the failure to produce that capital will undermine America’s security. Large, undereducated swaths of the population damage the ability of the United States to physically defend itself, protect its secure information, conduct diplomacy, and grow its economy.”
NOTE: Current immigration and visa policies are often cited as an important contributing factor to the posited decline in America’s stock of human capital.
Physical Infrastructure: The quantity and quality of physical infrastructure enables America’s economic productivity and resilience. The most thorough
periodic analysis of U.S. infrastructure is published by the American Society of Civil Engineers. Its 2013 report assigned an overall combined grade of “D+” for sixteen categories of infrastructure (down from “C” in 1988) and calculated necessary improvement costs at $3.6 trillion.
Other Possible Areas of Concern: Research and development (for now, America’s level of funding and the portion of GDP allocated to R&D remain high by global standards, albeit while China’s R&D spending is rapidly rising); energy supplies (of late, more relevant to American allies and the stability of global markets than to the U.S. specifically); the robustness of the U.S. industrial manufacturing base (down from about 28% of GDP in the mid-1950s to 11.7% in 2010); and the frequently decried dysfunction of the U.S. government and national political processes are additional issues that could develop over time into major constraints on U.S. foreign policy strategy.
http://news.investors.com/politics-andrew-malcolm/031414-693281-obama-global-warming-climate-change-gallup-poll.htm?p=full
As part of his desperate political plot to distract the country with something - anything - other than ObamaCare's debacle, Benghazi, the IRS, NSA or his tardy, empty Ukraine policies, Barack Obama has been talking a lot about global warming.
Forget about the Nov. 4 midterm election, folks. The world is burning up. (A crisis not to be wasted!)
Obama calls it "climate change" before his audiences because after this endless winter of polar vortexes and record snowfalls and ice cover, the word "warming" draws applause or chuckles, not his desired gasps.
(*SMIRK*)
Secretary of State John Kerry even said recently that global warming is "perhaps the world's most fearsome weapon of mass destruction."
* JOHN... FRIGGIN'... KERRY...
(*SIGH*)
He was not on "Saturday Night Live" at the time...
(*HEADACHE*)
Obama has often declared the science of global warming is settled. (Just as he'd like his broken, sinking, healthcare policies to be settled law.) Good luck with that, sir!
Now, out comes the Gallup Organization with a poll showing that barely a third of Americans (36%) believe global warming poses any threat to their way of life.
(The poll questions are written as if global warming is real or a given. But even with that pro-premise, the sector of Americans who believe global warming will never happen has doubled to 18% since 1997. While those who think it will happen during their lifetime has not increased.)
Of course, younger Americans, who fell hardest for Obama early on, still buy his stuff. Some 64% believe global warming has already begun or will soon. Seniors, naturally, know better; only 38% think the heat is already on.
(Speaking of early Obama, 2008 was high-tide for the global warming buffs. Since then, those who think it'll happen in their lives or will have a serious impact has been dwindling.)
The failure of the hot air argument could also arguably be traced in large recent part to Obama, who has made so many promises and issued so many warnings about so many things that never came to pass that he's become the blabber who cried wolf.
(Remember the imminent closure of Guantanamo from 2009? Still imminent.)
Recall the trillion departed dollars of 2010 that would produce hundreds of thousands of new jobs next month?
(Maybe this "Recovery April...")
Or the prosperity surely set to return if we fixed some roads and bridges, paid union teachers more and jack the minimum wage for those who survive the half-million firings caused by the same act?
(*HEADACHE*)
Remember the droned decimation of al Qaeda leadership that had that sandaled crowd on the run into the Valley of Defeat?
(Or the promising peaceful partnership with Russia...?)
Recall the looming menace of Moammar Gadhafi unless we liberated Libya, now ruled by warring factions including resurgent al Qaeda affiliates? Or Obama's red-line that Syria's regime better not fire chemical weapons across? Or the swift justice set to befall the killers of Benghazi still undelivered 549 days later? Or the slow-motion consequences sure to hit Putin if he invaded Ukraine.
So, now it's global warming's turn on Obama's teleprompter.
[Non-KoolAid-drinking] Americans have decided if he likes his global warming, he can keep his global warming.
Period.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/373416/republicans-hammer-away-growth-theme-larry-kudlow
In Joint Economic Committee hearings this past week, Republican chairman Kevin Brady talked about the “growth gap,” which describes the difference between the Obama "recovery" and other average recoveries of the past 50 years. America is missing 5.6 million private-sector jobs, reported Brady, and $1.3 trillion in real GDP from the economy.
* ONE... MORE... TIME...
America is missing 5.6 million private-sector jobs, reported Brady, and $1.3 trillion in real GDP from the economy.
Delivering the Republican party’s weekly radio remarks last week, Senator Rob Portman of Ohio reminded us that 11 million Americans have become so discouraged they’ve given up looking for work altogether, and that while poverty rates have gone up, the average family is now bringing home $4,000 less than they did just five years ago.
* ONE... MORE... TIME...
The average family is now bringing home $4,000 less than they did just five years ago.
* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/373338/unnecessary-overtime-reform-editors
Last month it was the minimum wage, today it is overtime: The regulatory state is the gift that keeps on giving Barack Obama the opportunity to indulge his meddlesome tendencies.
Tens of millions remain out of work, economic growth is anemic, his signature health-care law is such a dog’s breakfast of policy contradictions and wishful thinking that even he himself refuses to enforce it, and, though he has a sort of reverse Midas touch on matters economic, his adventures in micromanagement continue — this time as he seeks to overhaul overtime rules that are all of ten years past their last major overhaul.
The changes would make certain overtime-exempt employees, such as lower-level restaurant managers, eligible for overtime. Whether they would actually collect any overtime or be sent home at 39:59 each week is unknowable. What is knowable is that there are two fundamental economic lessons that Barack Obama cannot seem to learn: One is that the federal government cannot command productive private-sector jobs into existence; the second is that the federal government cannot command higher total wages in private-sector jobs.
As with the proposed minimum-wage hike — which would cost the economy 500,000 or more jobs — overtime rules beget economic tradeoffs. As the price of labor goes up, some businesses will simply hire fewer people or lay off current employees, seek ways to pass costs along to consumers or suppliers, or even eliminate certain business activities entirely if they become cost-prohibitive. The end result may or may not be higher total wages; it is as likely to be higher wages for some and unemployment for others.
* ONE... MORE... TIME...
It is as likely to be higher wages for some and unemployment for others.
The president, a longtime practitioner of free-lunch economics in which the benefits are advertised and the costs ignored, has a moral duty to consider both sides of the equation. It may be that he simply cannot, but it is in any case clear that he will not.
With real economic growth under 2%, growth in employment and wages is difficult to achieve. In response, the president proposes to revise regulations issued under the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act to make more workers eligible for overtime, apparently still operating under the Keynesian-lite hypothesis that giving a policy goose to wages will increase consumption and consequently growth. He might have consulted his own Bureau of Economic Analysis, which identifies as prominent among the causes of our slower economic growth “a deceleration in nonresidential fixed investment,” meaning that investors are not putting their money into factories, equipment, and other productive assets — a critical source of economic growth and those good-paying middle-class jobs that Washington is always going on about.
* FOLKS... PLEASE... RE-READ THE PRECEDING PARAGRAPH! OBAMA'S POLICIES ARE GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE OUT! HIS POLICY PREMISES ARE MORE OFTEN THAN NOT SIMPLY WRONG!
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)
Implicit in the president’s [faulty] reasoning here is his familiar zero-sum class-warfare analysis. The financial markets have been doing well, and corporate profits are very strong, but employment and wages are stagnant or declining. If your thinking is sufficiently shallow, [as Obama's clearly is,] then using overtime rules to move a little bit out of the profits column and into the wages column seems like a practical solution, and possibly a moral one.
(*ROLLING MY EYES*)
But it ignores important economic realities: The people who are doing the worst and placing the largest drag on total wages are not full-time workers exempt from overtime rules — a relatively small population — but people who have no jobs or only part-time jobs. The president’s proposed overtime changes would probably make that situation worse rather than better, adding another disincentive to full-time employment on top of the very strong one created by his health-care law.
Regulations beget regulatory disputes, and there has been substantial litigation over the rules as they stand, fighting out such questions as who counts as a manager and what counts as work. The fear of being sued for back wages has caused employers to impose highly regimented and occasionally draconian rules on their workers, for instance by making it a mandatory firing offense to work on one’s lunchtime or another scheduled break. It should go without saying that a regulatory innovation that makes employer-employee relationships less flexible rather than more flexible is undesirable from both parties’ points of view.
President Obama proposes to raise the bar of inflexibility, which means that prospective employees will have to prove to their employers that they are worth not only the wage but the hassle — and the latter is becoming a more important consideration every year.
President Obama’s overtime proposal will almost certainly raise the wages of some of his law-school buddies, but to the typical worker it offers a coin-toss between a possible pay bump and possible unemployment.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/03/14/wyoming-welder-faces-fine-for-building-pond-on-his-own-property/
All Andy Johnson wanted to do was build a stock pond on his sprawling eight-acre Wyoming farm.
He and his wife Katie spent hours constructing it, filling it with crystal-clear water, and bringing in brook and brown trout, ducks and geese.
It was a place where his horses could drink and graze, and a private playground for his three children.
But instead of enjoying the fruits of his labor, the Wyoming welder says he was harangued by the federal government, stuck in what he calls a petty power play by the Environmental Protection Agency. [T]he agency is now threatening him with civil and criminal penalties – including the threat of a $75,000-a-day fine.
* INSANITY... (AND UNCONSTITUTIONAL ON THE FACE OF IT. CRUEL AND UNUSUAL!)
The government says he violated the Clean Water Act by building a dam on a creek without a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers.
* DID HE? (AND IF HE DID, DID HE DO SO IN DEFIANCE OF FEDERAL LAW OR IN IGNORANCE OF FEDERAL LAW?)
* BTW... IS THE DAM ON THE CREEK HURTING ANYONE OR ANYTHING...??? (I ASSUME WE'RE TALKING A DAM ON HIS PROPERTY EFFECTING A CREEK RUNNING THROUGH HIS PROPERTY.)
The property owner says he followed the state rules for a stock pond when he built it in 2012 and has an April 4-dated letter from the Wyoming State Engineer’s Office to prove it. “Said permit is in good standing and is entitled to be exercised exactly as permitted,” the state agency letter to Johnson said.
* OK. SO... IT SEEMS THAT IF THE EPA HAS A PROBLEM... ITS PROBLEM IS WITH THE STATE - NOT THE CITIZEN! IF THE STATE SCREWED UP BY GIVING JOHNSON A PERMIT THEN ANY SUBSEQUENT COSTS SHOULD BE BORNE BY IT!
[T]he EPA claims that material from his pond is being discharged into other waterways.
* IS IT...???
Johnson says he built a stock pond - a man-made pond meant to attract wildlife - which is exempt from Clean Water Act regulations.
* IS THIS TRUE...???
“I have not paid them a dime nor will I,” a defiant Johnson told FoxNews.com. “I will go bankrupt if I have to fighting it. My wife and I built [the pond] together. We put our blood, sweat and tears into it. It was our dream.”
But Johnson may be in for a rude awakening. [T]he EPA isn’t backing down and argues they have final say over the issue. They also say Johnson needs to restore the land or face the fines.
Johnson plans to fight.
“This goes a lot further than a pond,” he said. “It’s about a person’s rights. I have three little kids. I am not going to roll over and let [the government] tell me what I can do on my land. I followed the rules.”
The EPA order on Jan. 30 gave Johnson 30 days to hire a consultant and have him or her assess the impact of the supposed unauthorized discharges. The report was also supposed to include a restoration proposal to be approved by the EPA as well as contain a schedule requiring all work be completed within 60 days of the plan's approval. If Johnson doesn’t comply - and he hasn't so far - he’s subject to $37,500 per day in civil penalties as well as another $37,500 per day in fines for statutory violations.
* AGAIN... FOLKS... THIS IS INSANE ON THE FACE OF IT.
* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/three-years-after-gaddafi-libya-is-imploding-into-chaos-and-violence-9194697.html
* AND LIBYA IS AN EXAMPLE OF "SUCCESSFUL" OBAMA/CLINTON FOREIGN POLICY...???
(*SCRATCHING MY HEAD*)
* HEY... ACCORDING TO MY GOOD FRIEND "HE WHOSE NAME DARE NOT BE MENTIONED" IT IS!
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
The Libyan former prime minister Ali Zeidan fled last week after parliament voted him out of office.
A North Korean-flagged oil tanker, the Morning Glory, illegally picked up a cargo of crude from rebels in the east of the country and sailed safely away, despite a government minister's threat that the vessel would be "turned into a pile of metal" if it left port...
(The Libyan navy blamed "rough weather" for its failure to stop the ship.)
Militias based in Misrata, western Libya, notorious for their violence and independence, have launched an offensive against the eastern rebels in what could be the opening shots in a civil war between western and eastern Libya.
Without a central government with any real power, Libya is falling apart. And this is happening almost three years after 19 March 2011 when the French air force stopped Mu'ammer Gaddafi's counter-offensive to crush the uprising in Benghazi.
* BENGHAZI... BENGHAZI... WHERE HAVE I HEARD THAT NAME BEFORE...???
A striking feature of events in Libya in the past week is how little interest is being shown by leaders and countries which enthusiastically went to war in 2011 in the supposed interests of the Libyan people. President Obama has since spoken proudly of his role in preventing a "massacre" in Benghazi at that time. But when the militiamen, whose victory Nato had assured, opened fire on a demonstration against their presence in Tripoli in November last year, killing at least 42 protesters and firing at children with anti-aircraft machine guns, there was scarcely a squeak of protest from Washington, London or Paris.
* YOU'RE READING THIS, RIGHT, FOLKS?
Coincidentally, it was last week that Al-Jazeera broadcast the final episode in a three-year investigation of the Lockerbie bombing that killed 270 people in 1988. For years this was deemed to be Gaddafi's greatest and certainly best-publicized crime, but the documentary proved beyond reasonable doubt that the Libyan intelligence officer, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, convicted of carrying out the bombing, was innocent. Iran, working through the Palestinian Front for The Liberation of Palestine – General Command, ordered the blowing up of Pan Am 103 in revenge for the shooting down of an Iranian passenger plane by the US navy earlier in 1988.
* HMM... (BEYOND ALL DOUBT...??? I MUST ADMIT, I HAVEN'T KEPT UP WITH THE LATEST DETAILS. THE INDEPENDENT IS A MAJOR MAINSTREAM UK NEWSPAPER HOWEVER.)
Much of this had been strongly suspected for years. The new evidence comes primarily from Abolghasem Mesbahi, an Iranian intelligence officer who later defected and confirmed the Iranian link. The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency had long ago reached the same conclusion. The documentary emphasizes the sheer number of important politicians and senior officials over the years who must have looked at intelligence reports revealing the truth about Lockerbie, but still happily lied about it.
* I WOULD LOVE TO HAVE THAT LIST!
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)
It is an old journalistic saying that if you want to find out government policy, imagine the worst thing they can do and then assume they are doing it. Such cynicism is not deserved in all cases, but it does seem to be a sure guide to western policy towards Libya. This is not to defend Gaddafi, a maverick dictator who inflicted his puerile personality cult on his people, though he was never as bloodthirsty as Saddam Hussein or Hafez al-Assad. But the Nato powers that overthrew him – and by some accounts gave the orders to kill him...
* MURDERED. HE WAS MURDERED. HE WAS CAPTURED... THEN MURDERED IN COLD BLOOD. NO TRIAL. BY OBAMA-LED AMERICA'S "ALLIES."
...did not do so because he was a tyrannical ruler; it was rather because he pursued a quirkily nationalist policy backed by a great deal of money which was at odds with western policies in the Middle East.
It is absurd to imagine that if the real objective of the war was to replace Gaddafi with a secular democracy that the West's regional allies in the conflict should be theocratic absolute monarchies in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf.
(This is equally true of Western and Saudi intervention in Syria which has the supposed intention of replacing President Bashar al-Assad with a freely elected government that will establish the rule of law.)
Libya is imploding.
* WHAT'S THAT YOU SAY...?
Libya is imploding.
* OH... (OBAMA AND CLINTON'S "VICTORY"... IMPLODING... GOT IT...)
Its oil exports have fallen from 1.4 million barrels a day in 2011 to 235,000 barrels a day.
Militias hold 8,000 people in prisons, many of whom say they have been tortured.
Some 40,000 people from the town of Tawergha south of Misrata were driven from their homes which have been destroyed.
[T]he militias are getting stronger not weaker. Libya is a land of regional, tribal, ethnic warlords who are often simply well-armed racketeers exploiting their power and the absence of an adequate police force. Nobody is safe: the head of Libya's military police was assassinated in Benghazi in October while Libya's first post-Gaddafi prosecutor general was shot dead in Derna on 8 February.
Western and regional governments share responsibility for much that has happened in Libya, but so too should the media. The Libyan uprising was reported as a simple-minded clash between good and evil. Gaddafi and his regime were demonized and his opponents treated with a naïve lack of skepticism and enquiry. The foreign media have dealt with the subsequent collapse of the Libyan state since 2011 mostly by ignoring it, though politicians have stopped referring to Libya as an exemplar of successful foreign intervention.
* BUT NOT MY FRIEND "HE WHOSE NAME DARE NOT BE MENTIONED...!!!"
(*GUFFAW*)
http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-nn-deportation-changes-20140314,0,3512651.story#ixzz2vyMo4iFP
Homeland Security officials are considering at least two major policy changes to scale back deportations of immigrants in the country illegally to comply with President Obama’s order for “more humane” enforcement efforts, officials said Friday.
* TO COMPLY WITH OBAMA'S WISH THAT THE LAWS NOT BE ENFORCED. (LET'S BE HONEST HERE, FOLKS.)
The first change would ease or stop deportations of foreigners who have no criminal convictions other than immigration violations.
* ...OTHER THAN IMMIGRANT "VIOLATION."
If approved...
* IF "APPROVED" BY THE VERY PEOPLE WHO REPORT TO THE PRESIDENT... (*SIGH*)
* YA GOTTA LUV HOW THE MSM REPORTS THIS STUFF...
...deportation efforts would chiefly target people who have been charged or convicted in court and pose a potential threat to public safety.
* ALL ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS SHOULD BE "TARGETED."
Thousands of people are deported every year who have overstayed their visas or entered the country illegally, including parents of children who are U.S. citizens, but who have broken no other laws.
* ...NO "OTHER" LAWS.
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
Another change under consideration would scale back a controversial program known as Secure Communities. It allows immigration authorities to request that immigrants in the country illegally be held in local jails until they can be transferred to federal facilities for deportation. The proposed change would limit those local detentions and focus only on people with criminal records.
* MEANING... CONSPIRE WITH THE VERY ILLEGALS THE FEDS ARE TASKED - BY LAW - WITH DEPORTING VIA TURNING THEM LOOSE!
* FOLKS... YA CAN'T MAKE THIS STUFF UP!
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the policy changes are still under review...
* READ THAT AGAIN. DOES IT MAKE SENSE TO YOU? WHAT'S "STILL UNDER REVIEW" HAVE TO DO WITH "SPEAKING ANONYMOUSLY?" (THE ANSWER: "NOTHING!")
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