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2014
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June
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- Barker's Newsbites: Monday, June 30, 2014
- America... or Amerika?
- Weekend Newsbites: Sat. & Sun., June 28 & 29, 2014
- Barker's Newsbites: Friday, June 27, 2014
- Barker's Newsbites: Thursday, June 26, 2014
- Barker's Newsbites: Wednesday, June 25, 2014
- Barker's Newsbites: Tuesday, March 24, 2014
- Barker's Newsbites: Monday, June 23, 2014
- The Kind of People the Obamas and the Clintons Are...
- Barker's Newsbites: Friday, June 20, 2014
- Barker's Newsbites: Thursday, June 19, 2014
- Michelle Malkin... Bowie Bergdahl... and an M.I.A....
- Barker's Newsbites: Wednesday, June 18, 2014
- Barker's Newsbites: Tuesday, June 17, 2014
- Barker's Newsbites: Monday, June 16, 2014
- Weekend Newsbites: Sat. & Sun., June 14 & 15, 2014
- Iraq and Oil Prices
- Barker's Newsbites: Friday, June 13, 2013
- Barker's Newsbites: Thursday, June 12, 2014
- Barker's Newsbites: Wednesday, June 11, 2014
- Barker's Newsbites: Tuesday, June 10, 2014
- Barker's Newsbites: Monday, June 9, 2014
- Barker's Newsbites: Wednesday, June 4, 2014
- We're Back...!!!
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June
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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://www.cnbc.com/id/101764568
A quarter of all public company deals may involve some kind of insider trading, according to the study by two professors at the Stern School of Business at New York University and one professor from McGill University.
The study, perhaps the most detailed and exhaustive of its kind, examined hundreds of transactions from 1996 through the end of 2012.
The professors examined stock option movements — when an investor buys an option to acquire a stock in the future at a set price — as a way of determining whether unusual activity took place in the 30 days before a deal's announcement. The results are persuasive and disturbing, suggesting that law enforcement is woefully behind — or perhaps is so overwhelmed that it simply looks for the most egregious examples of insider trading, or for prominent targets who can attract headlines.
The professors are so confident in their findings of pervasive insider trading that they determined statistically that the odds of the trading "arising out of chance" were "about three in a trillion." (It's easier, in other words, to hit the lottery.)
But, the professors conclude, the Securities and Exchange Commission litigated only "about 4.7% of the 1,859 "M & A" deals included in our sample."
http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2014/06/16/video-store-clerk-stands-up-to-shoplifting-mob/
Chicago police are investigating a bold and massive shoplifting scheme.
They walk into a store like any other shopper, only they have no plans to pay.
* CHECK OUT THE VIDEO TO SEE WHO "THEY" ARE.
In fact, they grab what they want and suddenly take off.
But as CBS 2’s Mike Parker reports, the thieves were not expecting a store employee to put up such a fight.
A dozen or so people came to the Grand Crossing neighborhood K & G clothing store, but not in search of advertised bargains. They came to steal, as a pack, and in broad daylight.
* NOT PEOPLE. ANIMALS. (HEY... THE REPORTER USED THE WORD "PACK." CORRECTLY IN MY VIEW.)
Surveillance video show a brazen robbery. The men and women bring their own shopping bags into the store and fill them up, then simply walk out of the store. The store is busy at the time and only one sales clerk catches on to what’s happening. He tries to stop one man at the door, and there’s a brief scuffle.
* AND IF THE CLERK HAD USED FORCE... CHANCES ARE THAT HE WOULD HAVE BEEN IN TROUBLE. (FOLKS... IT'S SICK OUT THERE AND GETTING SICKER!)
A few minutes later, a group of female thieves walks away, but the employee surprises them. He grabs one of their bags and then tosses it back into the store.
Every shoplifter gets away — one of them at high speed.
(*PURSED LIPS*)
“We were able to retrieve $2,200 worth of merchandise, but we’re estimating that they walked away with at least $1,200 worth of merchandise,” store manager Celestine Williams says.
Chicago police say this is an isolated incident.
* FOLKS... (*SNORT*)
This particular store had no security on duty at the time of the crime.
* AGAIN... WHAT WOULD "SECURITY" HAVE DONE WITHOUT "THE LAW" COMING DOWN ON THEM INSTEAD OF ON THE THIEVES?!
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/380576/irs-has-lost-more-e-mails-eliana-johnson
It’s not just Lois Lerner’s e-mails. The Internal Revenue Service [now] says it can’t produce e-mails from six more employees involved in the targeting of conservative groups, according to two Republicans investigating the scandal.
The IRS told Ways and Means chairman Dave Camp and subcommittee chairman Charles Boustany that computer crashes resulted in additional lost e-mails, including from Nikole Flax, the chief of staff to former IRS commissioner Steven Miller, who was fired in the wake of the targeting scandal.
The revelation about Lerner’s e-mails rekindled the scandal and today’s news has further inflamed Republicans. Camp and Boustany are now demanding a special prosecutor to investigate “every angle” of the targeting. They expressed particular outrage that the agency has known since February that it would not be able to produce the e-mails requested by the committee yet did not apprise the committee of that fact, and they charged in a statement that the IRS is attempting to “cover up the fact that it convenient lost key documents in the investigation.”
If Lerner is the central figure in the scandal — Oversight Committee chairman Darrell Issa said Monday evening he believes she was the senior-most official involved — Flax may be an important auxiliary figure. E-mails produced in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from the group Judicial Watch show Flax giving the green light to Lerner’s request to meet with Department of Justice officials to explore the possibility of criminally prosecuting non-profit groups — at the suggestion of Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse — for engaging in political activity after declaring on their application for non-profit status that they had no plans to do so.
* FOLKS... WE NEED TO DO AWAY WITH THIS WHOLE "NON-PROFIT" BUSINESS. IT'S A SCAM BOTH PARTIES TAKE ADVANTAGE OF. STILL... WE'RE TALKING REAL CRIMINALITY HERE. PEOPLE NEED TO GO TO JAIL!
E-mails uncovered by the committee last week showed that, in preparation for her meeting with the Department of Justice, Lerner and one of her advisers transmitted 1.1 million pages of data on non-profit groups, including confidential taxpayer information, to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, potentially in violation of federal law.
* AGAIN, FOLKS, TO SAY THAT WE CAN'T KEEP ON GOING WITH THIS "POTENTIALLY" NONSENSE DOESN'T MEAN WE CAN'T - LET ALONE SHOULDN'T - HOLD GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS CRIMINALLY RESPONSIBLE FOR THEIR CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR!
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/ali-meyer/price-index-meats-poultry-fish-eggs-rockets-all-time-high
The seasonally-adjusted price index for meats, poultry, fish, and eggs hit an all-time high in May, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
* ALL... TIME... HIGHS...!!!
In January 1967, when the BLS started tracking this measure, the index for meats, poultry, fish, and eggs was 38.1. As of last May, it was 234.572. By this January, it hit 240.006. By April, it hit 249.362. And, in May, it climbed to a record 252.832.
* NO INFLATION, HUH...?!
“The index for meats, poultry, fish and eggs has risen 7.7% over the span [last year],” says the BLS. “The index for food at home increased 0.7%, its largest increase since July 2011. Five of the six major grocery store food group indexes increased in May. The index for meats, poultry, fish, and eggs rose 1.4% in May after a 1.5 increase in April, with virtually all its major components increasing,” BLS states.
* FOLKS... YES YOU READ IT HERE... BUT ASK YOURSELVES IF YOU'RE READING THIS ELSEWHERE!
In addition to this food index, the price for fresh whole chickens hit its all-time high in the United States in May.
In January 1980, when the BLS started tracking the price of this commodity, fresh whole chickens cost $0.70 per pound. By this May 2014, fresh whole chickens cost $1.56 per pound.
A decade ago, in May 2004, a pound of fresh chicken cost $1.04. Since then, the price has gone up 50%.
* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jun/16/resume-padding-va-employee-got-big-bonuses/?page=all#pagebreak
A top Department of Veterans Affairs executive received tens of thousands of dollars in bonuses even after an internal investigation found she lied about having a master’s degree, according to a senior member of Congress who has asked the department to justify the bonus.
The Washington Times reported last month that a 2009 inspector general’s report found Ms. Cullen falsely claimed in numerous official documents over the years that she’d received a master’s degree from Bernard M. Baruch College-Mount Sinai School of Medicine.
Sheila Cullen, director of VA’s Sierra Pacific Network, received a $21,000 bonus in 2009 and $23,100 the following year. House Veterans’ Affairs Committee Chairman Jeff Miller, Florida Republican, disclosed the bonus in a letter last week to Sloan Gibson, acting VA secretary.
When pressed by investigators about the fact she never received the degree, Ms. Cullen said she didn’t know she had claimed having the degree and she didn’t know who wrote her resume.
* DIDN'T KNOW...?!?!
Mr. Miller called that explanation “laughable” in his June 13 letter to the VA.
* WHAT'S LAUGHABLE IS THAT THIS WOMAN ISN'T RIGHT THIS MINUTE LOCKED UP IN A FEDERAL PRISON!
As head of the VA’s Sierra Pacific Network, Ms. Cullen oversees 50 VA facilities serving more than 1 million veterans. She was already in the job when the VA’s inspector general investigated her academic credentials in 2009. VA officials declined to say last month whether she faces any discipline after the watchdog’s report, and an inspector general spokeswoman said whether Ms. Cullen had a master’s degree was irrelevant to her current job.
* ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME...?!?! SHE LIED ON HER RESUME! SHE LIED ON HER FEDERAL EMPLOYMENT APPLICATION - FALSIFIED OFFICIAL GOVERNMENT RECORDS!
Still, the lack of candor from such a senior official troubles Mr. Miller, whose committee has been investigating a widening scandal into falsification of wait times at multiple VA health care facilities across the country.
* "TROUBLED" MILLER...?!?! ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME...?!?!
In his letter to Mr. Gibson, Mr. Miller noted that making a false statements is against the law, “which is often met with termination of current, and disqualification from future, federal employment.”
* AND IN THIS CASE - BECAUSE OF THE HIGH DOLLAR AMOUNT OF BONUSES RECEIVED - RESTITUTION SHOULD BE DEMANDED... AND I'D SAY AT LEAST SIX MONTHS IN JAIL AND A CRIMINAL RECORD!
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)
In the inspector general’s 2009 investigative report to VA officials on Ms. Cullen’s academic claims, officials did not cite any potential punishment but recommended an ethics refresher course.
* GEEZUS...
“Ms. Cullen falsified the fact that she had a master’s degree on numerous occasions, including a form for a background investigation and applications for promotions, and throughout our investigation, she continued to make assertions that she did not misrepresent having a master’s degree,” the inspector general’s office reported in the July 7, 2009, memo to the VA.
* AND THE FUCKING FACT-CHECKERS MISSED THIS...?!?! SHE PASSED THE BACKGROUND INVESTIGATION WITH FLYING COLORS...?!?!
Ms. Cullen confirmed in an email last month that she was interviewed by the VA’s inspector general.
“I completed two years of graduate school however did not complete a thesis and therefore was not awarded a degree,” she wrote in an email. “This status was known when I was hired,” she said.
* WHAT... WAS... ON... THE... PAPERWORK...?!?!
While hiring forms accurately noted that Ms. Cullen, who started with the VA in 1973, was a graduate student, subsequent personnel forms — including several involving promotions — wrongly stated that she’d obtained a master’s degree, according to the inspector general. On several other applications and promotion requests she claimed to hold an Master of Business Administration — another false statement, investigators said.
* AGAIN... THIS WOMAN SHOULD BE IN JAIL. FEDERAL PRISON.
When investigators asked Ms. Cullen for copies of her transcripts, she kept them waiting for months, then said she didn’t realize she had submitted inaccurate information, according to the inspector general's memo.
* YOU LYING, CONIVING PIECE OF $HIT...
Mr. Miller gave Mr. Sloan until June 20 to tell him when VA officials first learned that Ms. Cullen provided false information on her employment records and what disciplinary action she faced. He also demanded Mr. Sloan justify the bonuses paid out to Ms. Cullen even after officials learned about the inspector general investigation.
* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)
http://blogs.wsj.com/peggynoonan/
Forty-one years ago, during a small and largely ignored government scandal, a great mystery occurred. A group of determined congressional investigators, who had learned the president of the United States was running a voice-activated taping system in the Oval Office, pressed to get their hands on the tapes. The courts ruled in their favor. The White House had to hand over a number of tapes. But it turned out one of them, which was understood by the timeline to potentially be the key one, the one that might reveal exactly how the scandal began, turned out to have an 18½-minute gap.
It came to pass that the longtime personal secretary of the president, Rose Mary Woods, who had been transcribing the tapes in preparation for turning them over, said she had made “a terrible mistake.” She had been listening to the tape when the phone rang; she turned, picked it up, meant to hit the stop button on the tape recorder but hit the record button instead, spoke on the phone for five minutes and when the conversation was over found that five minutes of the tape had been recorded over. Later, and doubly mysterious, it turned out that a total of 18½ minutes of the tape had been erased. No one knows to this day how that happened. The president’s chief of staff, Alexander Haig, once mused it might have been the work of some “sinister force.”
A few members of Congress went mad with fury, but nobody else really noticed or cared. It was a time of such drama—Vietnam, student demonstrations, a cascade of other scandals to distract the attention of the press. So everyone ignored what happened with the tape, and the Watergate scandal, as it was called, did not end in the impeachment of a president. It just went away, in time became “old news.” Well, the president had said there was “not even a smidgen” of corruption in the story, so there you are.
Ha, wait, that’s not what happened.
(*GUFFAW*)
(*VIRTUALLY HIGH-FIVING PEGGY NOONAN*)
The 18½ minutes of destroyed evidence had a galvanizing effect on an already galvanized national scandal. Rose Mary Woods was hauled before a grand jury, questioned, derided, called a pawn in a criminal cover-up. She endured for the rest of her life what the New York Times in its obituary called a “hideous, disfiguring fame.”
And Richard Nixon’s government...
(*PAUSE*)
...of course came crashing down - as did he.
Why is this pertinent? Because the Obama administration is experiencing what appears to be its own Eighteen-and-a-Half Minute moment.
In a truly stunning development in the Internal Revenue Service scandal, the agency last week informed Congress that more than two years’ of Lois Lerner’s email communications with those outside that agency — from 2009 to 2011, meaning the key years at the heart of the targeting of conservatives scandal have gone missing.
Quite strangely.
The IRS says it cannot locate them.
The reason...
(*PAUSE*)
* SO WE'RE TOLD..
...is that Lerner’s computer crashed.
* FOLKS... YA CAN'T MAKE THIS UP!
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)
What are the implications of this [ridiculous and frankly unbelievable] claim?
It means no one can see any emails Lerner sent to or received from other agencies and individuals, including the White House and members of Congress.
And what is amazing —not surprising, but amazing — is that if my experience of normal human conversation the past few days is any guide, very few people are talking about it and almost no one cares.
* THAT'S AMERIKA 2014. THAT'S MY FELLOW COUNTRYMEN AND COUNTRYWOMEN... AT LEAST FAR TOO MANY OF THEM. "WE THE PEOPLE" HAVE BECOME "WE THE SHEEPLE."
The IRS scandal as a news story carries a stigma, and the stigma is in part due to the fact that when it broke, when Lois Lerner last year made her admission [via] a planted question at an American Bar Association gathering that the IRS had made some "mistakes" with conservative groups and disingenuously suggested the blame lay with incompetents in a field office far from the Beltway, conservatives and partisans jumped.
The mainstream press was inclined to believe Lerner, or believe at least that a series of mistakes had produced a small if embarrassing so-called scandal.
Some conservatives, activists and partisans, not all of them sincere and not all of them serious, viewed the story primarily as another cudgel to use against the president and his party. Some no doubt viewed it as a fundraising opportunity.
* BUT HERE'S THE CRUCIAL POINT:
The press viewed it not as a story but as a partisan political drama. (And in partisan political dramas they are very rarely on the Republican side.)
I haven’t ever met a reporter or producer who wasn’t a conservative who didn’t believe the IRS scandal was the result of the bureaucratic confusion and incompetence of some office workers in Cincinnati who made a mistake. But ... if you can’t see the relation between a strangely destroyed key piece of evidence in an ongoing scandal and what happened 41 years ago with a strangely destroyed key piece of evidence in an ongoing scandal, something is wrong not with the story but with your news judgment.
(We won’t even go into the second story last week, that the IRS sent a big database full of confidential taxpayer information to the FBI.)
It would be very good to see the mainstream press call for a special prosecutor.
* FAT CHANCE.
* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)
http://online.wsj.com/articles/how-not-to-help-black-americans-1402961070
Liberals ... remain convinced that government has the ability to produce equal outcomes...
(*NOD*)
...though history repeatedly shows that intergroup differences are the norm rather than the exception.
(*ANOTHER NOD*)
The reality is that social policy, however well intentioned, has its limits, and when those limits aren't acknowledged the results can be counterproductive.
Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute reports that since 1964 "the U.S. welfare state has devoted considerable resources to assuring or improving the public's living standards — something like $20 trillion in inflation-adjusted dollars through antipoverty programs alone."
Notwithstanding this government largess, the official poverty rate in 2012 was higher than it was in 1966...
(*PURSED LIPS*)
...and the black-white poverty gap has widened over the past decade.
(*SILENCE*)
The racial disparity in incarceration rates is also larger today than it was in 1960.
(*SIGH*)
Black unemployment, on average, has been twice as high as white unemployment for five decades.
* SO LET'S ADD UNLIMITED NUMBERS OF MEXICANS, CENTRAL AMERICANS, AND SOUTH AMERICANS TO THE JOB-SEEKING POPULATION - AND THROW IN ASIANS AND "AFRICAN-AFRICANS" JUST FOR THE HELL OF IT!
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD IN ABSOLUTE DISGUST*)
One reason that Uncle Sam's altruism has not been successful is because the government is attempting to do for blacks what blacks can only do for themselves. Until those in the black underclass develop the work habits, behaviors and attitudes that proved necessary for other groups to rise, they will continue to struggle. And to the extent that a social program, however well-meaning, interferes with a group's self-development, it does more harm than good.
Upward mobility depends on work and family. Government policies that undermine the work ethic — open-ended welfare benefits, for example — help keep poor people poor.
Why study hard in school if you will be held to a lower academic standard?
Why change antisocial behavior when people are willing to reward it, make excuses for it, or even change the law to accommodate it - as in the Obama/Holder Justice Department's current push for shorter sentences for convicted drug dealers?
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)
The Obama presidency is evidence that blacks have progressed politically. But if the rise of other racial and ethnic groups is any indication, black social and economic problems are less about politics than about culture. The persistently high black jobless rate is more a consequence of unemployability than of discrimination in hiring.
(*NOD*)
The black-white learning gap stems from a dearth of education choices for ghetto children, not biased tests or a shortage of education funding. And although black civil rights leaders cite a supposedly racist criminal justice system to explain why our prisons house so many black men, it has been obvious for decades that the real culprit is errant black behavior too often celebrated in black culture.
* YEP...
"Everybody has asked the question, and they learned to ask it early of the abolitionists, 'What should we do with the Negro ?'" said Frederick Douglass in 1865. "I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm-eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall. . . . And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs!"
* AMEN...!!!
Douglass was stressing the primacy of black self-development, a not uncommon sentiment among prominent blacks in the decades following the Civil War.
Booker T. Washington, who like Douglass was born a slave, said that "It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of these privileges."
Douglass and Washington didn't play down the need for the government to secure equal rights for blacks, and both were optimistic that they would get equal rights eventually. But both men also understood the limits of government benevolence.
Blacks would have to ready themselves to meet the far bigger challenge of being in a position to take advantage of opportunities, once equal rights had been secured. The history of 1960s liberal social policies is largely a history of ignoring this wisdom.
* '60's... '70's... '80's... '90's... '00's... '10's...
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