Friday, September 26, 2014
Barker's Newsbites: Friday, September 26, 2014
Big doings this weekend... gotta buy me a new fall jacket!
Ohh... wait... hold on... not just me...
ALSO gotta buy The Poops some new duds for the upcoming Key West vacation!
Back to me... how many Hawaiian (or Cuban) shirts can one man have... I say let's go for the record!
Folks... seriously... we so RARELY buy "stuff" (as opposed to spending our money on food, drink, and general entertainment) that a shopping trip for clothing is exciting for us!
Anyway... I'm getting ahead of myself. (Heck... it's only Friday!)
On to Newsbites, my friends...!!!
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http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/1-4-americans-25-54-not-working_806178.html
A new chart from the minority side of the Senate Budget Committee shows a startling fact: Almost 1 in 4 Americans between the ages of 25-54 (prime working years) are not working.
There are 124.5 million Americans in their prime working years (ages 25–54).
Nearly one-quarter of this group — 28.9 million people, or 23.2% of the total — is not currently employed.
This group of non-employed individuals is more than 3.5 million larger than before the recession began in 2007.
Those attempting to minimize the startling figures about America’s vanishing workforce (workplace participation overall is near a four-decade low) will say an aging population is to blame. But in fact, while the workforce overall has shrunk nearly 10 million since 2009, the cohort of workers in the labor force ages 55 to 64 has actually increased over that same period, with many delaying retirement due to poor economic conditions.
(*PURSED LIPS*)
In fact, over two-thirds of all labor force dropouts since that time have been under the age of 55.
These statistics illustrate that the problems in the American economy are deep, profound, and pervasive, afflicting the sector of the labor force that should be among the most productive.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/congress/court-rulings-mean-judges-will-get-an-extra-1b-in-pay-and-benefits-20140924
* HAT TIP TO MICHELLE ZORNES!
More than 2,000 federal judges from Chief Justice John Roberts down will share in about $1 billion more in salary and benefits over the next 10 years because of court rulings determining that Congress improperly withheld automatic increases dating from the 1990s, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
* I'D LIKE TO KNOW HOW "AUTOMATIC INCREASES" EVEN PASS CONSTITUTIONAL MUSTER. (REGARDING FEDERAL PAY... REGARDING FEDERAL PROGRAMS... ALL OF IT...)
"As a result of those decisions and corresponding administrative actions, many judges will now receive automatic salary increases, and subsequent annuity adjustments, as well as restitution for prior automatic salary increases they should have received," wrote CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf.
His cost calculations were delivered in a letter on Wednesday to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy.
The letter addresses the financial impacts of successful court challenges to the congressional withholding of federal judge pay increases in 1995, 1996, 1997, 1999, 2007, and 2010. Those legal challenges were most notably carried out in Beer v. United States and Barker v. United States.
* NO RELATION! (IN EITHER CASE!)
(*GUFFAW*)
Federal court judges have already started to benefit. Their salaries rose by 14% on Jan. 1, as the years of missing cost-of-living adjustments were added to their paychecks. The chief justice now is paid $255,500, and associate Supreme Court justices have a $244,400 salary. U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judges are getting $211,200 a year, and the annual salary of a U.S. District Court judge is $199,100.
* LISTEN. MY PROBLEM ISN'T WITH THE AMOUNTS. MY PROBLEM IS THAT IT'S CONGRESS' JOB TO DECIDE ON PAY INCREASES (OR PAY DECREASES) AND NOT FOR ONE SPECIFIC TERM OF CONGRESS TO PUT SALARY AND BENEFIT RAISES ON AUTO-PILOT.
As a cumulative result of the court decisions, writes Elmendorf, direct federal spending will be higher by about $1.027 billion from 2015 through 2024. Only about $190 million of that will be discretionary costs, subject to annual appropriations.
How did this happen?
To protect the courts against influence by the other branches of government, Article III of the Constitution includes a prohibition against judges having their salaries reduced during their tenure in office.
* MEANING AMOUNTS... NOT PURCHASING POWER! COM'ON...!!!
But in 1990s, as congressional pay became a political issue, lawmakers launched populist-minded efforts to cancel yearly cost-of-living increases for themselves. They also included the judiciary — and judges responded with lawsuits.
Roberts, like his predecessor as chief justice, William Rehnquist, had been a vocal critic of the failures to raise judicial pay. Roberts characterized the issue as having reached the level of a "constitutional crisis" in his year-end report on the state of the courts in late 2006, and he continued to raise the issue after that.
* THE FACT THAT ROBERTS SITS ON THE COURT - AS CHIEF JUSTICE NO LESS - IS THE TRUE CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS!
Ultimately, the issue was decided by the high court actually choosing not to do something. The Supreme Court last year decided it would not review a 2012 decision in the Beer case by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which held that Congress had to pay judges the cost-of-living adjustments dating from 1995.
* TALK ABOUT THE FIX BEING IN...
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)
http://buchanan.org/blog/basket-snakes-6981
* THE ALWAYS COHERENT PATRICK J. BUCHANAN
“Once war is forced upon us, there is no other alternative than to apply every available means to bring it to a swift end. ... “War’s very object is victory, not prolonged indecision.”
So said Gen. MacArthur in some of the wisest counsel the old soldier ever gave his countrymen.
* I WONDER... I TRULY DO... HOW MANY AMERICAN 18 YEAR OLDS... HOW MANY AMERICAN 24 YEAR OLDS... COULD CORRECTLY IDENTIFY MACARTHUR AND GIVE A FEW PERTINENT DETAILS ABOUT HIS BIOGRAPHY.
Yet, “prolonged indecision” would seem the essence of the war the president has begun to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the Islamic State.
(*SIGH*)
Following only one night of bombing in Syria, Gen. Bill Mayville, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs, asked to estimate how long this new war would last, replied: “I would think of it in terms of years.”
* WHAT WAS THAT...???
“Years,” the general said.
(*SILENCE*)
Yet, though we are already heavily into bombing, the president has no congressional authorization for this war in Syria.
And how are we going to “destroy” ISIS when Obama has ruled out U.S. combat troops and not one NATO or Arab ally has offered to send combat troops?
Consider Turkey. With its 400,000-man army, 1,000 planes, 3,600 tanks, 3,000 artillery pieces and self-propelled guns, the Turks, the largest military power in the Middle East, could make hash of the Islamic State. Why have they not done so? Because Turkish President Erdogan detests President Assad of Syria and has looked the other way as volunteers, including Turks, have crossed his border into Syria to join ISIS.
Up until now, this NATO "ally" has been a silent partner of ISIS.
Even now, Ankara has not volunteered to fight the Islamic State.
If the Turkish army is not going to intervene in Syria against ISIS, and if Obama has ruled out U.S. boots on the ground in Iraq or Syria, where will the soldiers come from to dislodge the Islamic State from the Indiana-sized territory it has seized?
* WHERE, INDEED, MR. PRESIDENT...???
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)
The Kurds can hold Erbil with U.S. air support. Iraq’s regime, backed by its Shia militias, can hold Baghdad. But can the Iraqi army retake Fallujah, Mosul or Anbar, from which they so recently ran away?
Who are the major fighting forces in Syria who have for years been holding the line against ISIS? Answer: the Syrian army, Hezbollah troops from Lebanon, and Iranians, backed by Putin’s Russia.
* PUTIN'S RUSSIA. WHICH FIRST BUSH AND THEN OBAMA TOTALLY ALIENATED. GREAT MOVE!
(*VOICE DRIPPING WITH SARCASM*)
* RUSSIA SHOULD BE IN THE WESTERN CAMP - AN ALLY AGAINST CHINA. INSTEAD... WE'VE PUSHED RUSSIA TOWARDS CHINA... AND BACK INTO A COLD WAR AGAINST US!
* BUSH WAS A MORON! OBAMA MAKES BUSH LOOK LIKE A MENSA SOCIETY FOUNDING LIFE MEMBER!
Denouncing the Islamic State for its beheadings of the two Americans and one British aid worker, Obama declared at the U.N.: “There can be no reasoning — no negotiation — with this brand of evil. The only language understood by killers like this is the language of force. So the United States of America will work with a broad coalition to dismantle this network of death.”
* ISN'T THIS THE GUY WHO TRADED FIVE AL-QIADA TERRORISTS FOR ONE AMERICAN DESERTER...???
* ISN'T THIS THE GUY WHO VIEWS BOTH FT. HOOD MASSACRES AS "WORKPLACE VIOLENCE?"
[In any case,] for three years it has been NATO "ally" Turkey and Arab "allies" like Saudi Arabia and Qatar who have been clandestinely aiding this network of death. And it has been Assad, Hezbollah, Iran and Russia that have been resisting this network of death.
A year ago, the American people rose up to demand that Obama and John Kerry keep us out of Syria’s civil war, specifically, that they not carry out their threats to bomb the army of Bashar Assad. Had it not been for Assad, Hezbollah, Iran, and Russia, the network of death Obama rightly excoriated from that U.N. podium might by now be establishing its caliphate, not in Raqqa, but Damascus.
(*RUEFUL CHUCKLE*)
Before we go any deeper into Syria, Congress needs to be called back to debate and vote on whether to authorize this new war.
* FOLKS... CONSIDER THE FOLLOWING:
This war against the Islamic State seems, for some in that blood-soaked region, not so much to be a war of good against evil, but the first of several wars they want America to fight. For them, the Islamic State is to be destroyed by the Americans. Then the Assad regime is to be brought down by the Americans. Then Iran is to be smashed by the Americans. Everyone in the Middle East seems to have in mind some new war for the Americans to fight.
How many such wars are in our vital interests?
While, undeniably, the Islamic State has shown itself beyond the pale with its beheading of innocents and its massacres of soldiers who have surrendered, let us not forget that our allies abetted these monsters, while adversaries we have designated as terrorists and state sponsors of terror were fighting them.
Lord Palmerston had a point when he said Great Britain has no permanent friends, no permanent enemies, only permanent interests.
[America's interests should determine [America's] policy.
* ONE... WOULD... THINK...
http://online.wsj.com/articles/political-diary-obama-ferguson-and-the-u-n-1411680776
President Obama's decision to reference the shooting death of [thug... punk...] Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., during a United Nations speech on foreign affairs Wednesday raised eyebrows, and not just because the investigation is ongoing.
After spending the bulk of his remarks discussing the ethnic and religious disputes that fuel so much of the world's terrorism, the president mentioned the Ferguson shooting and then added, "So, yes, we have our own racial and ethnic tensions" and "like every country, we continually wrestle with how to reconcile the vast changes wrought by globalization and greater diversity with the traditions that we hold dear."
(*HEADACHE*)
Politico reported that it was "unusual" for the president to reference "domestic U.S. shortcomings during a speech devoted to international issues." Asked for an explanation, a White House official said the president wanted to acknowledge that the U.S. is "not perfect."
Well, neither is Mr. Obama's analogy.
Tensions between the police and low-income black communities are not based on race or ethnicity. They are based on the fact that blacks commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime in America — almost all of it directed at other blacks.
Police don't go into these communities to shoot blacks; they are there, by and large, to stop blacks from shooting each other.
[Police] are [patrolling these areas] because that is where the 911 calls originate.
(And for their troubles they now have the president of the United States all but comparing them to terrorist groups.)
This is the latest example of the president exploiting Ferguson to rile up black voters, whom Democrats fear will stay home in November. It is of a piece with the multiple, redundant federal investigations into the shooting. The Obama administration knows full well that Bull Connor doesn't run the Ferguson police department, but it will to pretend that's the case to score political points with the president's base.
* OBAMA IS A PIECE OF $HIT. PERIOD.
A lot of interesting topics packed in news bites already today, William! And the one before this...I hadn't made the connection between Obama mentioning Ferguson at the UN to comparing our police to terrorists. Honestly? I couldn't figure out WHY he mentioned it, in the context of his speech...but now it makes sense. To point out we "aren't perfect". Obama seems, always, to feel COMPELLED to make us look like a very weak nation.
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