Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Fed Signals Plan to Wind Down Stimulus, Possibly Triggering Recession

After the market’s close on Friday, Jon Hilsenrath at the Wall Street Journal released an article implying that the Fed might remove or reduce its QE programs before the year end.
The reason this matters is because Hilsenrath is thought to be an unofficial mouthpiece for the Fed. Time and again he’s released articles hinting at the Fed’s future policies in advance. And many believe senior Fed officials such as Bernanke will personally leak ideas to him to test the public’s response to said ideas in advance.
So many believe that Hilsenrath’s Friday article was indeed the Fed preparing the markets for a tapering or removal of QE before the year end. Given that the entire US market is moving lockstep with Fed activity (the Fed’s balance sheet has literally reflated the NYSE tick for tick post 2009) this is a huge deal.
This supports our view that the Fed is aware stocks are in a bubble and is attempting to prep the market in advance for less liquidity.
Since QE 2, the negative effects of QE (higher costs of living) have outweighed the positive effects (higher stock prices) by a wide margin. Only 52% of US households own stocks… but everyone is paying for higher food and higher energy prices.
On a deeper level, QE is a drug for the market. There is no evidence in history that QE creates jobs or growth Both Japan and the UK have launched QE equal to over 20% of their GDP, neither have experienced a significant pickup in jobs or GDP growth as a result.
So QE was always about one thing only: pushing the market higher. But now the market is completely detached from economic realities. There is a word for this… it’s “bubble.”
The Fed knows this and is now trying to prepare the market for withdrawal. But the market is on total life support from the Fed. Take away the Fed punchbowl and the party stops.
Between this, rampant insider selling (makes you wonder if the people running the companies know something about the economy the Fed is ignoring), the downturn in economic data in the US, and the ongoing disaster that is the US jobs market, the market is priced for a total collapse.
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Some Links of Interest....

Obama Does Not Understand Warfare


How Liberal Media Profit from Supporting Democrats


Obama's Shrinking Unit of Account


SHOCK: Judge Who Ended Interrogation Of Boston Bomber Without DOJ Knowledge Linked To Muslim Brotherhood, Muslim Governments

David Axelrod Defends WH On IRS Scandal: Wouldn’t Have Happened‘If Anybody Political Was Involved’ (someone tell this douchbag it was all political!)

Turkey’s Jihadi Government Building $100 Million Mega-Mosque In U.S.
URGENT MUST-READ FOR ALL AMERICANS: The 4 Stages Of Islamic Conquest
http://patdollard.com/2013/05/americans-must-read-4-stages-of-islamic-conquest/

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Obama's Most Dangerous 'Enemies' are Being Targeted

An Interesting Piece........
There is a pattern emerging in the Obama Presidency. He is at war with reality; his greatest enemies are facts. And he has been targeting for years a small group of people whose duty is to expose the truth. Their loyalty runs to the citizenry and not to Barack Obama. They are not Republicans and they are certainly not journalists. And Obama has been trying to muzzle them. One man stands in the way.
Inspectors General (IG) are government employees who are responsible for ferreting out mismanagement, fraud and corruption in the federal government. The Barack Obama presidency has provided them with a target-rich environment. They are responsible for uncovering a wide range of Obama failures. These include:
The Department of Justice's Fast and Furious Fiasco; Massive waste and corruption in the stimulus and "green energy" programs with an agenda to reward Obama donors and whose weatherization programs were rife with waste and fraud.
Deluxe spending of taxpayer money by GSA employees who clearly did not take their assigned duties (to save government money spent by others) seriously and mismanagement at the US Department of Agriculture;
The State Department's Inspector General is investigating the special internal panel that probed the Benghazi failures for its apparent whitewashing of the scandal behind the deaths of Americans.
The Special Inspector General, Neil Barofsky, of the Troubled Asset Relief Program reported that the Obama administration had engaged in 'Enron-like accounting" to hide its mismanagement (as covered below, he earned the wrath of the Obama hit squad).
Recently, of course, the normally lapdog press has been compelled to cover the controversy over the role of Treasury Department's meting out "special treatment" to conservative groups and donors to Republicans to neuter them as forces in the 2012 election has generated headlines. The IRS Inspector General's report triggered the planting of a question at an ACA meeting, and the public apology by Lois Lerner, which in turn ignited hearings and press coverage.
The list of abuses uncovered by the Inspectors General has been multiplying as rapidly as the national debt has under Obama. The government wastes billions by not listening to Inspectors General Obama wants to all but eviscerate them.
Inspectors General are career employees not political appointees. Obama's minions cannot dismiss their reports as being merely partisan attacks (many of them, such as Barofsky, are Democrats). They operate in obscurity, away from the klieg lights, diligently searching for malfeasance while protecting taxpayers.  They do not profit from exposing wrongdoing; their credibility is rock-solid. Impure motives cannot be imputed to them-a favorite rhetorical weapon of Obama and his team.
There are very few unsullied heroes in Washington-very few people looking out for hard-working Americans. Among them should be Inspectors General.
They are threats to Obama's image and agenda and have therefore earned their place on Obama's enemies list. While Obama can't send the drones after them they do have targets on their backs.
Where are those missing Inspectors General?
Over the past few years Barack Obama has attempted to starve the beast by refusing to fill vacancies in the ranks of Inspectors General as they have arisen. The White House been routinely chided for years over its negligence. Timothy Smith of the Washington Postreported in May of last year that "there were 10 IG vacancies, including five at cabinet-level agencies. Four of them had been vacant for more than 3 years."
Congressman Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Government Oversight and Government Affairs Committee, stated that 'This administration's failure to fill inspector-general vacancies has weakened the effectiveness of the inspector-general community, thus exposing American taxpayer dollars to waste, fraud and abuse". Well...never let it be said that Barack Obama did not accomplish one of his most important goals. And it took so little work on his part.
 The Project on Government Oversight (an independent, nonpartisan good government watchdog) has even launched a web page that tracks how long vacancies have been left open across the federal Inspector General system.
Obama has also attempted to slash the budgets of the inspector general for the Office of Management and Budget: one of the key Inspector General positions since the official has a broad mandate to focus on government spending. This from a man who never met abudget he did not want to expand or a person he did not want to put on the federal payroll. Yet, the one program he wants to slash (aside from the Defense Department) is the program that is designed to protect taxpayers.  Incidentally, he did plan on a $30 billion dollar program that was uniquely designed to have no oversight by any Inspector General (i.e., a bigger slush fund than anyone ever cooked up in Cook County) but Republican resistance squashed his plans (for once).
Shocked?
Wet work, Obama-style
So what can Obama do with current Inspectors General?
Intimidation and character assassination are tools in the Obama armory. America's President  is after all  a man who bragged that he "brings a gun to a knife fight," and who confronted a fellow Democrat who was wavering on the Obamacare vote with the threat "Don't Think we're not keeping score, brother" (see The President is 'Keeping Score" : Chicago politics has moved into the White House" ). He also "joked" about IRS audits back in 2009-and, lo and behold, the IRS sicced itself on conservatives and others not long later.
Barack Obama's proxies have threatened Inspectors General on more than one occasion. Gerald Walpin ran afoul of the Obama team when he dared to report that a friend of Obama's was misusing government funds for personal expenses, meddled politically in a local election, and  may have included hush money to women to keep them quiet about sexual harassment by him. What were Walpin's rewards for protecting taxpayers? His dismissal followed by heaps of personal abuse and accusations of mental illness
He has company.
The Inspector General at the OMB who reported on Obama's plans to slash his budget was told by officials there that they'd "make life miserable for him" if he complained about his budget being cut
The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction reported that administration officials had pressured him to remain silent regarding the massive waste of funds and corruption associated with the program and that officials had tried to edit his report to remove anything that might embarrass the White House (presaging the Benghazi scandal). The abuse led to his resignation.
The aforementioned Neil Barofsky was subject to scathing personal attack for exposing and disclosing massive waste and fraud in the Troubled Asset Relief Program.  Jen Psaki, a spokeswoman for the 2008 campaign who had become the deputy communications director at the White House, engaged in such personal vituperation that it shocked old Washington hands. She accused Barofsky of trying to generate "false controversy" to "grab a few cheap headlines" and then continued with similar personal insults of Barofsky.
Psaki has been rewarded for faithfully serving as an Obama attack dog by being promoted to the high-profile and prestigious spot as State Department spokeswoman (replacing the Victoria Nuland, who herself has been promoted despite of, or because of, her role in scrubbing Benghazi talking points). Professionals were surprised that someone so inexperienced in diplomacy and foreign affairs had been appointed to such an important and public post since a mistake by her could have international ramifications that could reflect poorly on America . They should not be surprised since her role the last few years has been to protect Obama's image, not America's image or standing in the world.
She will no doubt continue to perform the same role she has had for years: to protect her boss and trample anyone who may harm his image.
Issa and the Inspectors General
Congressman Darrell Issa (R-Calif), Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has been investigating the Obama administration for years (prompting severe political and personal attack by Obama allies). The White House saw the threat early and maneuvered to have faithful ally Elijah Cummings (D-Maryland) placed on the committee, surprising some since another Congressman was in line for the spot. Cummings was thought to have better skills to run interference for Obama.
Issa has not been daunted and has relentlessly investigating the Obama administration for years. He has a special appreciation of the importance of Inspectors General and has relied on their non-partisan expertise to disclose the failures of the Obama administration.  Issa wants to expand the reach and enhance the power of the Inspectors General. His goal was clear as early as 2010.
David Herszenhorn wrote in the New York Times (New Chairman seeks more power for watchdogs:
The Republican who will lead the chief investigative committee in the House is planning to vastly expand scrutiny of the Obama administration by seeking new subpoena powers for dozens of federal agency watchdogs in hopes of using their investigations and his own in an aggressive push to cut spending and shrink the government.
Issa knows that oversight of Obama will not come from the media who have become lapdogs. The true watchdogs have been Inspectors General who remain the unheralded heroes of Washington and whose war on them by Barack Obama another scandal the media has ignored.
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FOX NEWS VS. THE CULT OF OBAMA

It is impossible to understand the Obama administration's uniquely hostile treatment of Fox News without understanding the self-image of the Obama team. On the one hand, the targeting of Fox News for isolation and surveillance suggests an administration so lacking in competence that it cannot tolerate criticism or scrutiny. On the other, the attacks suggest hubris, a confidence that few would ever object to its conduct.

That contradiction has a religious quality to it. Indeed, President Barack Obama has led an administration that has, at times, been more of a religious movement than a governing body. Obama has made miraculous promises of political and planetary transformation; he has encouraged a cult-like following, even among formerly skeptical journalists; and he has constructed a demonology of his opponents, real and imagined.
Most of all, the Obama administration preaches a millenarian idea of history that places it at the apex of a process of moral evolution. In that view, the "long arc of history" that Obama cited in his victory speech in 2008 does not just bend towards justice in a moral sense, but towards him in a political sense. He and his supporters see his election as both the culmination and transcendence of everything that came before him.
Accordingly, Obama and his supporters refuse to be judged on normal criteria, such as the president's actual record in office. Though he is quick to claim credit on the rare occasion--such as the bin Laden raid--when things go right, President Obama typically adopts a prophetic distance from the office he holds that insulates him from criticism and allows him to attack the very Washington he leads, the very political games he plays.
The heresy of Fox News is not just that it criticizes the Obama administration or that it provides a platform for conservative opinion, but that it rejects the attempt to place Obama beyond politics and accountability. It refuses, in other words, to endorse the idea that Obama inhabits a unique category, beyond the obvious (and, for most governing purposes, meaningless) historic fact that he is the nation's first black president.
Democrats use race to defend Obama from criticism, but race is not what makes him special to the left. It is but one way in which he embodies an idea that existed long before him and will persist after he leaves office--namely, the Hegelian notion that the redistributionist state represents the fulfillment of history, that the noble intentions of the left make it morally superior, by default, regardless of their practical consequences.
Obama not only shares his party's belief in its moral superiority but also embodies it in his own person. His preference for the word "I" is but one symptom. In a recent, typical example, he told the media: "I've still got 60,000-plus troops in Afghanistan," as if those soldiers serve him personally and at his pleasure. The corollary: his critics must be motivated by personal hatred or bigotry, not any independent principles.
That conviction, in the Obama inner circle, is what likely justified the hostile treatment of Fox News, which led to the abusive investigation of reporter James Rosen and others. Unlike the Nixon administration, which was suffused with paranoia, the Obama White House suffers from an excess of self-regard. It is threatened less by opposition than by independence--and by the idea that we must be students of, not servants of, history.
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Monday, May 27, 2013

Memorial Day Thoughts





Photo
Everyone Has a story. My thoughts and Prayers are with anyone who lost a loved one....
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Sunday, May 26, 2013

More Liberals Are Turning on Eric Holder, Demanding He Be Fired

The constitutional violations of the Obama administration are so severe that it has created bi-partisan backlash, meaning that people who have spent years defending Obama are slowly starting to turn on at least parts of his administration.
Many liberal columnists, senators, representatives, and activists have admitted that Eric Holder did in fact lie about targeting Fox News journalists, violated their constitutional rights of a free press, and are using the federal government to intimidate the opposition. This is textbook corruption and censoring tyranny.
Of course, Eric Holder should do more than resign or get fired. He should be prosecuted for lying to congress about the attack on the freedom of the press. He lied, it’s a felony, and he should be charged.
  • Keith Olberman. The liberal and absurdly annoying talking head said the following on Twitter: “Unacceptable. If Mr. Holder continues to support this rogue action, he should resign.”
  • Rep. Zoe Lofgren: The liberal Democrat said,“Reporters who might have previously believed that a confidential source would speak to them would no longer have that level of confidence, because those confidential sources are now going to be chilled in their relationship with the press.”
  • Bill Press. Liberal radio host Bill Press said, “What ‘breach of national security’ are we talking about re the AP story? It’s BS and Holder should be fired… I’ll repeat what I said earlier. POTUS should fire Eric Holder.” 
In the end, this is just the start. Over the coming months, we’ll see if they really mean it or if this is just a short-term pause in the assault on liberty by the left.
Regardless, the truth should be clear: Holder should be fired and then prosecuted for lying to congress and ordering an attack on the freedom of the press. His legacy should be one of shame, not power.
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6 Reasons the IRS Scandal Leads to Obama

At this point, essentially all evidence points to the fact that Obama knew of and likely ordered the IRS attack on the Tea Party. He joked about it, talked about it, met with the people who initiated it, and met 100+ times with the IRS chief while it was occurring.
Since the scandal broke, everyone seems to be falling on their swords and protecting the White House. Meanwhile, some officials are coming forward saying it “comes from the top”.
Some people are so blindly in love with Barack Obama — for reasons I will probably never understand — that they believe it’s all fabricated and just a stunt by Republicans. So let’s look at the evidence.
1. Orders Came “From the Top”
Even though the official story is that it was just a question of “low level” workers acting on their own, we now know that is a lie for a variety of reasons. Some IRS officials have even come forward, with one saying that it came “from the top”:
“We people on the local level are doing what we are supposed to do. . . . That’s why there are so many people here who are flustered. Everything comes from the top. We don’t have any authority to make those decisions without someone signing off on them. There has to be a directive.”
Considering the Obama administration immediately began claiming this was a low-level issue, it should be clear how far up this goes, especially in light of everything else we know about Obama’s involvement.
2. Obama Talked About It Beforehand
Obama joked about using the IRS as a weapon in 2009, just a year before the Tea Party attack began. While clearly it was only a joke, it’s pretty clear that using the IRS in a political context wasn’t something he’d never considered.
If this was the only evidence, there wouldn’t be a link to Obama. But mixed with the reasons listed below, it’s simply more damning of what should be obvious at this point.
3. Obama Met With the Woman Who Helped Start the Attack
On the day before the first stage of the Tea Party being targeted by the IRS, Obama met personally with the woman in charge of the union for the employees of the IRS.
Why would this matter? The person in charge of the IRS union — that is different from other unions in that they’re more powerful in day to day operations — wrote the following about working with Obama:
“We are looking for a return to what we used to call partnership. I don’t really care what it’s called. For me, it’s about collaboration.”
Yes, it’s literally that obvious and out in the open. No, this isn’t even a conspiracy — this is a public power grab.
The day after the meeting, the attack on the Tea Party began. If someone thinks this was a coincidence, then I have a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell.
4. Obama Met With the IRS Chief 100+ Times While It Happened
Besides the “collaboration” and “partnership” between IRS employees and Obama, we also know that Obama met with the IRS chief 100+ times during the targeting of the Tea Party:
Now, we’ve found out that the former IRS chief personally met with Obama 100+ times during the time that the IRS was targeting Tea Party and libertarian/conservative groups. During this time, the former IRS chief claims he “absolutely” never told Obama about the attack on the Tea Party.
5. The White House Knew 5 Months Before the Election
We know that Obama met with those responsible, met with those in charge of the IRS while it was happening, and now we know that the White House knew about itwhile it was happening as well:
The New York Times is now reporting that the Obama administration did in fact know of the IRS targeting of Tea Party groups a full 5 months before the election.
This isn’t just iffy at this point. If Obama didn’t order and know about the attack on the Tea Party, then that would be news at this point. All of the evidence suggests the opposite.
6. Official Who Ran Tea Party Division Now Runs Obamacare Office:
I had to read several news stories about this myself before I could wrap my mind around how blatant the corruption was:
Sarah Hall Ingram served as commissioner of the office responsible for tax-exempt organizations between 2009 and 2012. But Ingram has since left that part of the IRS and is now the director of the IRS’ Affordable Care Act office, the IRS confirmed to ABC News today.
The idea that this is all just a bizarre coincidence is simply absurd. Obama knew about it from the beginning, benefited from it, rewarded people involved in it, and is now lying about it.
There isn’t yet concrete proof that Obama ordered the IRS attack on the Tea Party and tried to use the IRS to swing the election. We would need an actual memo or for someone to explicitly admit it. This will likely come out in the following months. More and more information is coming out on an almost daily basis — this is a good thing, and should continue.
In the end, I have no doubt that we’ll learn the truth: that Obama is fully behind the attack, and shouldn’t just be impeached — he should be prosecuted for criminal attacks on American liberties.
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INFURIATING: Illegal Alien Mows Down Connecticut Cop and Girlfriend While Driving Drunk and High – And She Is a Registered Voter

  Melissa Ramirez Credit: News 12 Connecticut screenshot An infuriating tragedy unfolded this month as an illegal migrant killed a Connectic...