Conservatively Speaking

CHINA HAS THE OK TO SELL STANDING ROOM ON COMMERCIAL FLIGHTS. GIVES THE PHRASE "STRAP HANGER" AN ENTIRELY NEW MEANING.

Why did Barack Obama and Hugo Chavez jointly sponsor a U. N.  resolution condemning the people of Honduras for resisting the spread of Marxists communism by evicting a would-be dictator, former President Manuel "Mel" Zelaya. Hondurans view "Mel" as a puppet of Venezualan dictator Hugo Chavez and rightly so. The coup started after "Mel" defied the Honduras Supreme Court's bar on his grab to be "Preisdent for Life" setting up a communist dictatorship like Castro and Chavez.

In Honduras, demonstrators have appealed to the media to tell the truth. One sign said in Spanish: "CNN: That the entire world opens its eyes…Honduras wants peace not a dictatorship."

Yet America's media  report on the turnout of a couple hundred pro-Zelaya protesters in Honduras, ignoring the many thousands that have demonstrated in support of ousting the radical leftist tyrant. Demonstrators carried signs saying, "Peace and democracy. Out with Mel and Chavez." Others said, "Democracy yes; communism no."

Ironically the :"new media" which was extolled in Iran is being ignored in Honduras. Bloggers charge Zelaya with adopting the style, advice and funding from left-wing leaders such as Hugo Chávez, Fidel Castro, Evo Morales, Rafael Correa and Daniel Ortega."

An anti-communist alliance called UnoAmerica, the Union of Democratic Organizations of America, has recognized the new government of Honduras and urges support for it, issuing a statement saying that "in Honduras there has not been a blow to the state, but rather a constitutional succession, perfectly legitimate, after the intent of ex-president Manuel Zelaya to violate the constitution and maintain power, following the mandate of Hugo Chavez."

Regarding Obama's ally, Venezuelan ruler Chavez, UnoAmerica said that "He is tied to Colombian narcotics terrorism (FARC) and to the government of [Iranian President] Ahmadinejad. He finances the Cuban dictatorship. He permanently tramples the Constitution and kidnaps the liberties of the people. He commits electoral fraud. He forcibly represses peaceful and disarmed Venezuelans. He closes means of communication. He hates the Catholic Church."

Rebutting charges of a "military coup," UnoAmerica noted that "the Armed Forces of Honduras have been limited to obey the judicial mandate, that which obligates a reestablishment of constitutional order, thus showing its subordination to the civil authority."

Complicating plans by the Obama White House and its U.N. allies for a forced return of the former president, Honduras Foreign Minister Enrique Ortez told CNN en Espanol that Zelaya was implicated in drug trafficking from Venezuela into the U.S.

"Every night, three or four Venezuelan-registered planes land without the permission of appropriate authorities and bring thousands of pounds…and packages of money that are the fruit of drug trafficking," he said. "We have proof of all of this. Neighboring governments have it. The DEA [U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration] has it," he added.

At a U.N. meeting on October 13, 2008, Zelaya had openly called for the legalization of drugs - supposedly to reduce violence - just weeks after the Obama supporter George Soros-funded Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy had met to discuss how to pursue such a course of action. The group subsequently released a report calling for a "paradigm shift" on how to handle the illegal drug problem. Billionaire Soros, a long-time funder of campaigns to legalize dangerous drugs, has purchased the services of several former Latin American government officials to push this cause.

Zelaya's comments were immediately denounced by U.N. Office of Drug Control regional representative José Manuel Martinez Morales, who said such an approach was to "stick our heads under the sand like ostriches and accept the drug trade which is annihilating our youth."

Last November Zelaya appeared with Soros at a U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean conference in the Dominican Republic.

At the Tuesday news conference at the United Nations, where a resolution was adopted in favor of returning Zelaya to power, the ousted Marxist ruler was asked if the United States had been behind the "coup" that forced him out. No, Zelaya said. "The United States has changed a great deal," he explained. He went on to say, "I have listened to President Obama. It is not only that he condemns the events, but he has demanded the restoration of the President," referring to himself.

On this point, Zelaya was correct. The United States has certainly changed under Obama. When Ronald Reagan was president, the United States assisted pro-freedom forces and endeavored to keep the communists out of Central America. Now, the United States intervenes on behalf of the communists and their allies, using the U.N. as cover.

Zelaya held his press conference at the U.N. with the President of the United Nations General Assembly, Miguel D'Escoto, a communist priest who received the Lenin Peace Prize from the old Soviet Union.

D'Escoto is another one of Obama's allies, having worked with his Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice to forge a new international socialist order at the recent United Nations Conference on the World Financial and Economic Crisis. The scheme involves world government financed by global taxes, another cause that is very popular with George Soros.

This article is based in part on on a published analysisby Cliff Kincaid, Accuracy in Media on July 1, 2009 confirmed by other sources and edited and amended.   

What do Johnny Depp, Garfield, Paris Hilton and roast pork have in common? In China, the answer is that a new government-mandated Internet filter rates some pictures of all four of them as bad for your moral health and its is blocked.

The afterword in Pulitzer Prize-winning author Joseph J. Ellis' best selling 2007 book "AMERICAN CREATION" is particularly prescient. "The American founding," he writes, " lasted for twenty-eight years, from 1775 to 1803. During that time the United States declared and won its independence, a gradual revolution in the social landscape was begun that, truth be told, has yet to run its course…"

Within that context Ellis had described America's landmarks good and bad concluding by speaking about "perhaps the most creative act of the founding era as to make time as well as space an indispensible ally. In effect extending the founding moment everlasting into the future."

If you subscribe to Ellis' notions of creating time and space into an everlasting future contrast and compare that with the report of what Dr. Charles Krauthammer said to a private group at the Center for the American Experiment including:

• 1. Pay no attention to what Obama says, rather watch what he does.
• 2. Obama came to Washington to dismantle capitalism.
• 3. Obama sees himself more a world ruler than just US President - standing above it all - orchestrating and coordinating various countries and their agenda.
• 4. He sees moral equivalency in all cultures.
• 5. His apology tour was a prime example that he sees America as an imperialist nation.

Assuming Ellis' and Krauthammer's theories are each at least partially relevant I believe then I can argue that 2009 will at least begin a reformation if not a revolutionary change.  But, not what most who voted for him thought.Revolution not in the shooting sense but as a time of major spasm similar to that which consumed most of that period between 1775 and 1803. . 

As America turns from a predominantly white country of Judeo-Christian Euro centric ethos to a tan one where Hispanics are much more prominent;  blacks less so in terms of numbers but disproportionately shoved forward by Obama.The reformation or revolution will NOT come easily or willingly. Exactly how that will happen is unclear.but it clearly is occurring.

What is most clear is that Obama has throttled up America to breakneck speed and put it on an umapped and contorted road of blind curves. What is also clear is Obama is disinterested in being a unifierunder any pretext and now has his 60^th Senate vote in the person of admitted arch liberal Al Franken - so he need not be.  Rather he is about change as only he envisions fit.  

Obama's domestic and foreign policy are a mixture of craps, Texas holdem', chess and Russian roulette but with only one chamber empty and pointed at your head. Does America still heed John Adam's admonition for a nation of laws not of men, or a man.

Happy '"INDEPENDENCE" day.

State police in New York say two Pennsylvania men robbed a gas station and might have gotten away if they had also fueled up. Troopers said they caught 29-year-old Lonnie Meckwood, of Carbondale, and 51-year-old Phillip Weeks, of Tunkhannock, after their getaway car ran out of gas while the were trying to escape late Monday night

The move aims to counter Western depictions of the country as a fast and loose post-communist frontier. Gambling operators say the state is pushing the industry underground - and losing $1 billion in tax revenues.

 There are big empty spaces on som e of Moscow's trendiest streets early Wednesday, where the glitziest symbols of post-Soviet freedom - gambling casinos - had done a roaring business until they were closed down by a strict new law, literally at the stroke of midnight.

The law, promoted by former president and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and in the works since 2006, was aimed at shutting down a controversial business that a majority of Russians consider "immoral" and damaging to the country's image.

About 500 major gaming establishments have been forced to close their doors, including some truly palatial casinos in downtown Moscow that were frequented by many in the country's elite. Also shut down by police are countless hole-in-the-wall joints in grocery stores, train stations, and street kiosks that had featured a few slot machines or one-armed bandits and catered to just about anybody who passed by.

Gambling operators say up to 400,000 people have been tossed out of their jobs and the state has lost up to $1 billion in legal tax revenues, while the lucrative gambling industry will probably thrive anyway - but underground, in the hands of organized crime.

"A casino is a necessary service, like restaurants and theaters," says Vadim Bereslavksy, who managed the Hotel Cosmos casino in Moscow for the past 15 years, and was responsible for around 800 employees. "Many of the people who worked with me will have a hard time now; we'll try to find them jobs in the industry outside of the country."

Fast and loose post-communist frontier?
But many conservatives have chafed for years at Western depictions of Russia as a fast and loose post-communist frontier, run by mafia thugs and anything-goes capitalists.

For many of them, the huge neon-lit casinos that have dominated Moscow's post-Soviet downtown nightscape were a symbol of national decay.

"Practice has shown that this business is socially destructive," says Yevgeny Fyodorov, chair of the State Duma's committee on economic policy. He says it caused large numbers of people, including vulnerable groups like pensioners, to become "addicts" and led to serious damage to families and communities.

"Gambling is neither acceptable for the authorities, nor for society. Here we have absolute support," he says.

A survey released this week by the independent Profi Online Research agency found that 72 percent of Russians support the law, while 19 percent oppose it.

Moscow mayor tackles remaining exceptions 
From now on, gambling in big Russian cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg will be limited to lotteries, bookmakers, and licensed "poker clubs" where card games will be treated as a form of sports.

But Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov, a stern opponent of gambling, says he's already moving to crack down on those exceptions.

"We've approached the government for a decision of poker clubs and Internet gambling for cash, which is pretty much the same as the gambling business," Mr. Luzhkov told the official Itar-Tass agency. "Poker clubs? How can you call that sport?"

Officials seem unconcerned about the loss of tax revenues and the sudden spike in unemployment, despite the fact that Russia is gripped in economic crisis.

"We'll lose tax money, but the costs incurred by people who became addicted to gambling were so much higher that we'll actually save," says Alexander Krutov, a Moscow Duma deputy.

"And I'm not in the least concerned about the casino personnel," he adds. "They have good manners, they tend to speak English, and they're mostly young. They'll adapt and do fine."

Four new gambling zones 
Ironically not unlike the then remote emptiness of Las Vegas Vladimir Putin is playing a latter-day Bugsy Siegel by proposing four remote districts where gambling will be permitted, which could be transformed into Las Vegas-style tourist zones.

One "zone" is in Russia's far east, near the border with North Korea. The others would be in the Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad, a remote southern spot near the Sea of Azov, and in the mountainous Altai republic in Siberia.

But industry specialists say nothing has been done to develop the zones, and they are too far off the beaten track to attract serious investment.

"These four areas are not a real project, and they will never work because they can't generate any income in those places," says Boris Belotserkovsky, chairman of the Unikum Group, Russia's biggest producer of gambling equipment.

He says the ban on gambling is "like prohibition on alcohol. It will just drive the business underground."

Actor Karl Mauldin has died at age 97. He once joked that his nose qualified him for handicapped parking.

On July 14, President Obama will throw out the first pitch at the All-Star Game in St. Louis. Joe Biden will be on hand to commit the first error.

It has been a couple decades since the then USSR used Cuba as its African proxy to spread violent discord across the continent most notably then in Angola. That pretty much failed and certainly ended when the USSR collapsed. .

Now the race for Africa's resources is heating up again as RFussia's President Dmitry Medvedev goes on a four-day trip this week to key countries aimed at reestablishing Russia's influence on the continent.

After signing a strategic cooperation pact with Egypt, Dmitry Medvedev travelled to Namibia, before penning nuclear and gas deals with energy-rich Nigeria on Wednesday.

According to a featute story in MOSCOW NEWS datelined June 25, 2009 exact details of the Nambian deal were not released, Gazprom, Russia state owned energy giant, was reportedly interested in signing a $2.5 billion deal to create a joint oil and gas exploration venture with the Nigerian National Petroleum Corp, signaling its intent to strengthen its grip on Europe's energy supply.

Although exact details were not released, Gazprom, Russia state owned energy giant, was reportedly interested in signing a $2.5 billion deal to create a joint oil and gas exploration venture with the Nigerian National Petroleum Corp, signaling its intent to strengthen its grip on Europe's energy supply.

Although exact details were not released, Gazprom, Russia state owned energy giant, was reportedly interested in signing a $2.5 billion deal to create a joint oil and gas exploration venture with the Nigerian National Petroleum Corp, signaling its intent to strengthen its grip on Europe's energy supply.

"I think Gazprom still wants to buy all gas produced around Europe and resell it on its own terms," said Mikhail Korchemkin, head of the East European Gas Analysis, a US-based consultancy.

Gazprom has lagged behind competitors like Royal Dutch/Shell and ExxonMobil in the battle for Afircan oil and gas.

To start competing Gazprom wants to gain involvement in the Trans-Saharan pipeline, which would transport Nigerian gas to Europe, though some have seen geo-political motivations in this move as re-exporting gas eats into the monopolist's profit.

"As a business model, it [re-exporting African gas] does not make sense," said Korchemkin.

Although Russia is not dependent on Sub-Saharan raw materials, there are substantial gains to be made as their extensive resources remain undeveloped.

"The sizeable infrastructural gap in Nigeria and Angola could also create substantial attractive opportunities for Russian companies in the power, energy and construction sectors," Renaissance Capital wrote in a note.

It is speculated that LUKoil is looking to increase its presence in West Africa, as it has investments in Ghana and Cote D'Ivoire, while RusAl already holds a majority stake in Nigerian aluminium smelter Alscon.

Medvedev was scheduled to meet with Angola's president, Jose Eduardo dos Santos, who studied in the Soviet Union and was married to a Russian.

Angola is a major oil producer and currently holds the OPEC presidency.

"While the trip to Angola might be driven by the desire to secure contracts in the oil industry, one should not discount the 'political relation' aspect of this visit," Renaissance Capital said in a note.

Despite not having the economic clout of Nigeria and Angola, Africa's second- and third-largest economies, respectively, Namibia was on Medvedev's agenda as a major producer of uranium oxide and has extensive undeveloped natural resources, including diamonds, in which Russia's Alrosa has investments.

Nuclear power was on the agenda in Egypt, which is building its first nuclear plant in 20 years and Rosatom is hoping the presidential visit will boost their claim for the $1.8 billion tender.

Since the USSR's collapse "Russia's" influence in Africa has withered while China's has investments have boomed - to $11 billion in Nigeria alone.

Playing the Africa card appears a logical next step in the Putin planned renaissance of Russia. Its resurrection in the Middle East and now Africa has largely resulted from the [received weakness in Obama foreign policy that is seen as fragmented, and a peculiar mix of Ramsey Clark and Rodney King. Plus Obama is obcessed with pushing an increainsgly radical domestic agenda and even more desperate to renew the START nuclear arms reduction treaty which Medvedev will do while exacting a painful long term price for the US.

Excoriate (ik-SKOR-ee-ayt) verb tr.:1. To severely criticize someone or something.2. To strip off the skin. From Latin excoriare (to strip or to skin), ex- (out) + corium (skin, hide). Ultimately from the Indo-European root sker- (to cut) that is also the source of words such as skirt, sharp, scrape, screw, shard, shears, carnage, curt, carnivorous, hardscrabble, and incarnadine.

As a first generation American  of Scots-Irish heritage.  I can testify that there is no love lost between them and the "English" notwithstanding fighting for centuries for the British empire. Indeed it is a heady time in Irish pubs and Guiness is flowing by the barrel.

After a centuries of conflct it appears the people of Ireland now have the fate of Britain in their hands and without a drop of bloodshed. The deal reached by Irish Premier Brian Cowen at the EU summit at the weekend appers to have snooked the English allowing him to call a new referendum on the Lisbon Treaty in early October.

If the Irish vote "yes," and "Gordon Brown's wretched lame duck of a government clings to power in London until next year," then Britain will probably remain a member of the EU. If the Irish vote "no," then Britain's disengagement is likely to begin.

David Cameron, the Conservative leader who looks almost certain to win Britain's next election, has promised a separate British referendum on the Lisbon Treaty if the ratification process is not completed in all 27 EU member states. The Irish referendum is one such hurdle. The German Constitutional Court is another, but on what seems to be a technical matter. The Czech and Polish presidents have yet to sign the ratified document, but all other legal procedures are complete.

So an Irish "yes" vote means that Cameron will probably not have to carry out his promise to hold a referendum in Britain. This would probably come as something of a relief to Cameron, who is happy to run against the EU when campaigning in Britain, but does not want to leave the EU altogether. The question will be how Britain can stay a member of an organization when all its other members have agreed to create an entirely new one, and Britain alone rejects it.

Most opinion polls say the British would vote against the Lisbon Treaty by a margin of two to one. In the European Parliament elections earlier this month, Gordon Brown's Labor candidates were beaten into third place behind the United Kingdom Independence Party, a single-issue party that says "no" to Europe.

Most Conservatives now oppose the treaty, even though it was their party that took Britain into Europe more than 30 years ago, and many of their senior figures remain fundamentally pro-European. These party splits over Europe have been deeply damaging. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was toppled for being too skeptical of Europe. Her successor John Major was emasculated in Parliament by his own anti-Europe rebels. The arguments over the treaty could bring back those bitter divisions of the past.

"The treaty transfers power from national parliaments to the Brussels bureaucracy and would make Britain a province of a European state with a European president," comments William Rees-Mogg, a former editor in chief of London's The Times who speaks for many traditional conservatives.

So David Cameron's priority is to ensure that Europe does not become so prominent an issue that it splits his party yet again. That was why he promised the referendum, in what at the time seemed like an empty gesture. Now it could be the issue that defines his political future.

This issue has been building for years. The Lisbon Treaty, which gives the EU a powerful new president and foreign minister and gives greater powers to the elected European Parliament, originally began 10 years ago as a new EU Constitution.

When the French and Dutch voters rejected that idea in a referendum in 2005, the Eurocrats of Brussels cunningly reinvented the constitution as a treaty. This meant it could be ratified by parliaments without need for a referendum -- except in Ireland, where the government was not allowed to get away with such fancy footwork.

It is largely the same document, although some symbols that suggest a European federal state have been removed, like the EU anthem and flag.

The next Irish referendum is now the key. At the last time of asking, they voted "no." But since the rest of the EU has now agreed to add a solemn protocol to the treaty to guarantee that the Irish will not have to give up their traditional neutrality and their control over the own taxes and abortion laws, Cowen can now tell his voters that he has secured a better deal than the one they rejected.

The big difference is that when they voted "no," the Irish thought their economy was doing fine. This year their economy is in deep recession, and without the euro and the prospect of EU support, the country would be at great risk of defaulting on its debts. So the opinion polls suggest that the Irish will vote "yes" in October and put the British political system into an agonizing dilemma.

Cameron would love to replace Gordon Brown sooner rather than later, but not if the timing would force him to hold a British referendum on Europe. Brown would rather hang on until May 2010, the final date by which he must call an election. But if Brown can be toppled soon by his own party, and a new leader calls an election in October, the opinion polls say they would lose many fewer seats in Parliament. And they would thrust Cameron into an immediate and ruinous crisis over Europe.

Only the -Irish and Scots can organize an election dust-up such as this.

"President Obama suggested at a town hall event Wednesday night that one way to shave medical costs is to stop expensive and ultimately futile procedures performed on people who are about to die and don't stand to gain from the extra care." -- Peter Nicholas, Los Angeles Times

Before Iran's presidential election, Obama sent a secret "love note" to its supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei calling for "cooperation in regional and bilateral relations" and a resolution of the dispute over Iran's nuclear program.

 Irans media gave great prominence to the strange disclosure - for which they cited the Washington Times of Wednesday, June 24 - in order to underline Obama's backing for Khamenei and president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in contrast to his latest words of condemnation for the regime and support for the "reformists." At best the letter was ill-timed and with Obama's later repudiation creates and image of confusion and indecision or worse.

 According to the WT, a senior Obama administration official speaking on condition of anonymity refused to confirm or deny that this letter had been sent to the supreme leader or whether there had been a response.

 Iran is using this expose to embarrass Obama for telling a news conference in Washington Tuesday that Iran's rulers are on the wrong side of history while sending secret expressions of support. .

The secrecy of the communication can only add to the awkwardness because it points to Obama being convinced that once the protest movement dies down, he can go back to his plan for engaging Iran's leaders in dialogue almost as soon as the bodies are buried.

Khamenei himself referred indirectly to the missive when he commented in his sermon last Friday:

"On the one hand, they write a letter to us to express their respect for the Islamic Republic and for re-establishment of ties, and on the other hand, they make these remarks. Which one of these remarks are we supposed to believe."

 Following the disclosure of the Obama letter, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs announced: "Given the events of the past many days, those invitations [for Iranian diplomats to attend July 4 events in different world capitals] will no longer be extended."

 The events going back and forth in a single day, Wednesday, signaled a conspicuous retreat in the process of US-Iranian rapprochement and a continuation of waffling that encourages U. S. enemies to act more aggressively.

A Sunday school teacher was teaching her young students about Noah and the ark. She asked them what they thought Noah may have done to pass the time in the ark for forty years. After waiting a few moments, the teacher suggested, "Maybe he did a lot of fishing. How about that?"

One little boy gave her a funny look and said, "I don't think so. It's kinda hard to fish with just two worms!"

China is rapidly building up its submarine forces with more capable and quiet submarines and advanced weapons designed to sink U.S. ships and submarines in a future conflict, according to recent testimony before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

Commission Co-chairman Larry Wortzel, a former military intelligence analyst and operator, told the June 11 hearing that China in recent years has made "great strides" in building up its naval forces, specifically submarines.

"Since 2004, the Chinese navy has procured dozens of modern naval platforms, including 20 submarines spread among five different classes, eight destroyers, and 24 advanced fighters, the Su-30 Mkk2 [jets]," Wortzel said.

"China is on the cusp of an operational submarine-based nuclear deterrent and the Central Military Commission seems to be considering building aircraft carriers," he said.

Additionally, China is working on a credible military capability to deny regional access to U.S. and other ships through anti-ship ballistic missiles and anti-ship cruise missiles.

Wortzel noted that Chinese military writings have stated the need for Beijing to "control the seas" through missiles, electronics and information technologies that span the surface, subsurface, air and space domains.

Recent far-away naval deployments by Chinese ships, including the Gulf of Aden, the transiting of Chinese warships through Japan's Tsugaru Strait into the Pacific, and the noticeable increase in overseas port calls "demonstrate that the Chinese navy is turning into a blue water navy," he said.

Congressional Research Service specialist Ronald O'Rourke told the commission that China's navy is rapidly building up an array of advanced warfighting weapons.

"China's naval modernization effort encompasses a broad array of weapon acquisition programs, including programs for anti-ship ballistic missiles (ASBMs), anti-ship cruise missiles (ASCMs), land-attack cruise missiles (LACMs), surface-to-air missiles, mines, manned aircraft, unmanned aircraft, submarines, destroyers and frigates, patrol craft, amphibious ships and craft, mine countermeasures (MCM) ships, and supporting C4ISR  systems," O'Rourke said.

Chinese submarine forces include construction of "a significantly more modern and capable submarine force."

Since 2006 the Chinese have taken delivery of eight Russian-made Kilo-class non-nuclear-powered attack submarines. These are in addition to four Kilos China purchased from Russia in the 1990s.

China has recently built or is building four other classes of submarines, including the following:

• a new nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) design called the Jin class or Type 094;
• a new nuclear powered attack submarine (SSN) design called the Shang class or Type 093;
• a new SS design called the Yuan class or Type 041 (or Type 039A); and
• another, also fairly new SS design called the Song class or Type 039/039G.

O'Rourke said the new submarines benefited from Russian technology and are faster and quieter and thus more difficult to detect. Its current force includes 28 relatively modern attack submarines - meaning Shang, Kilo, Yuan, and Song class boats. Between 1995 and 2007 China deployed 38 submarines, an average of 2.9 submarines a year.

"This average commissioning rate, if sustained indefinitely, would eventually result in a steady-state submarine force of 58 to 88 boats of all kinds, assuming an average submarine life of 20 to 30 years," O'Rourke said.

The submarines are armed with one or more of the following: anti-ship cruise missiles, wire-guided and wake-homing torpedoes, and mines. China's eight recently delivered Kilos are armed with highly capable SS-N-27 Sizzler ASCMs.  In addition to other weapons, Shang-class SSNs may carry land attack cruise missiles.

A Harley rider is passing the zoo when he sees a little girl leaning into the lion's cage.

Suddenly, the lion grabs her by the cuff of her jacket and tries to pull her inside to slaughter her under the eyes of her screaming parents.

The biker jumps off his bike, runs to the cage and hits the lion square on the nose with a powerful punch. Whimpering from the pain  the lion jumps back, letting go of the girl, and the biker brings her to her terrified parents, who thank him endlessly.

A New York Times reporter has watched the whole event.. The reporter says, "Sir, this was the most gallant and brave thing I saw a man do in my whole life." The biker replies, "Why, it was nothing, really, the lion was behind bars. I just saw this little kid in danger, and acted as I felt right."

The reporter says, "Well, I'm a journalist from the New York Times, and tomorrow's paper will have this story on the front page… so, what do you do for a living and what political affiliation do you have?"

The biker replies, "I'm a U.S. Marine and a Republican."

The following morning the biker buys The New York Times to see if it indeed brings news of his actions, and reads, on front page:

"U.S. MARINE ASSAULTS AFRICAN IMMIGRANT AND STEALS HIS LUNCH."

 Russia's official defense newspaper reported last week that a new Cold War between the United States and China is impending. Ten days ago Pravda, Russia's official news service, advised Obama to stop his foolish domestic spending and now is adbvising him on foreign policy.

"The United States requires new weapons, particularly in missile defense systems and in other super modern military potential in order to deter China's steady build-up of its nuclear and conventional arsenal and to create a counterweight to it," the newspaper reported June 16.

The comment was based on a draft report on China produced by a State Department advisory board and first reported in The Washington Times.

The Russian report said that the semi-secret State Department report identified China's strategy as going beyond building forces capable of taking back Taiwan and that China was striving to "break out," projecting its might beyond the limits of the region, including shipping lanes over which energy products needed for Chinese modernization are transported.

The Russian report said the U.S. is building up missile defenses in Asia to counter China and is actively recruiting allies for development of other defenses, including Japan and Australia.

For China, a "major objective is to counter U.S. presence and U.S. military capabilities in East Asia through the acquisition of offensive capacities in critical functional areas that systematically exploit U.S. vulnerabilities." According to the document, the arms build-up is occurring in accordance with existing tenets of "asymmetric warfare." In particular, "space and cyber weapons are being developed, which can help the Chinese forces vanquish the stronger American Army."

The report appeared in Krasnaya Zvezda, or Red Star, the official newspaper of the Russian defense ministry.

Eleemosynary (el-uh-MOS-uh-ner-ee, el-ee-, -MOZ-) adjective: Relating to charity. ETYMOLOGY: From Latin eleemosynarius, from eleemosyna (alms), from Greek eleemosyne (pity, charity), from eleemon (pitiful), from eleos (pity).

Many years ago I putted into the Grange Hall yard aboard an ancient Allis Chalmers tractor - at 12 or 13 years old I was far too young to drive it on highways but I could always talk my way out of it. I figured. I risked it because the occasion promised entertainment as "government men" were going to propose putting methane traps on the rear ends of dairy cow.

I was late having had to herd a recalcitrant cow to the barn yard where she definitely didn't want to go. As I crunched through the snow laughter erupted and I entered in time to see a neighbor toppling backwards off his folding chair amid tearing eyed, raucous gaffawing.

The government man had just shown his federal cow fart filter sending the place into hysterics and him out into the snow.

Now, according to AP,  with farmer's price of milk falling Vermont dairy farmers mindful of shrinking their carbon footprint, are changed their cows' diet to reduce the amount of gas the animals emit to limit dairy cows' contribution to global warming.

They say they can reduce the cows' intestinal methane by feeding them flaxseed, alfalfa, and grasses high in Omega 3 fatty acids. The gas cows belch is the dairy industry's biggest greenhouse gas contributor, researchers say -most of it emitted from the front and not the back end of the cow proving those government wrong all those years ago. Now if you have ever been in a dairy barn for more than 5 minutes you might dispute those research results.

At any rate it is said the dairy industry contributes about 2 percent to the country's total greenhouse gas production. Most of it comes from the cow, the rest from growing feed crops for the cattle to processing and transporting the milk.

To satisfy consumers' demands for "sustainable" production, dairy farmer associations are looking at everything from growing feed crops to how milk is truck to reduce the industry's greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent by 2020. That would be the equivalent of removing about 1.25 million cars from U.S. roads every year.

An enduring legacy of all this is the idea of collecting all that flammable methane gas - some way or other - and producing electricity from methane gas. Belief me I am all for reducing cow burps and flatulence but for far more practical reasons as anyone who has spent more than 5 minutes in a dairy barn will attest.

Muldoon lived alone in the Irish countryside with only a pet dog for company. One day, the dog died, and Muldoon went to the parish priest and said, "Father, my dog is dead. Could ya' be sayin' a mass for the poor creature?"

Father Patrick replied, "I'm afraid not. We cannot have services for an animal in the church. But there is a new denomination down the lane, and there's no tellin' what they believe. Maybe they'll do something for the creature."Muldoon said, "I'll go right away Father. Do ya' think $5,000 is enough to donate for the service?"

Father Patrick exclaimed, "Sweet Mary, Mother of Jesus! Why didn't ya' tell me the dog was Catholic?"

 In honor of summer solstice and in recognition of the witches and pagans who gathered at places like Stonehenge and on Santa Barbara's State Street for the annual solstice celebration Saturday here's a modern renewal of a famous curse.

A production of "Macbeth" now in rehearsal at Cal Lutheran University - north of Los Angles -has suffered the "curse." First, the actor with the title role suffered a detached retina; another fell off a roof and broke a foot, another quit. According to the "Los Angeles Times," all have been recast and the play is set to open this Friday as scheduled.

The belief in the curse on the play endures and is widely held among thesbians who typically refrain from even uttering the play's title in a theatre, instead referring to it as "the Scottish play."

Macbeth was likely written between 1604 and 1606 by William Shakespeare. According to legend, it was performed at Hampton Court in 1606 for King James I and his brother-in-law, King Christian of Denmark, and was clearly designed to appeal to King James. Not only was Banquo, who just happens to be a part of the Stuart family tree (as was James), portrayed favorably, but the play itself was fairly short, probably because King James preferred short plays. Most importantly, James himself had previously published a book on witches and how to detect them. Because of this, Shakespeare decided to give his play a supernatural twist in another effort to please the King. For the opening scene of Act IV, he reproduced a sacred black-magic ritual in which a group of witches danced about a black cauldron, shouting out strange phrases and ingredients to be thrown into it. The practitioners of rituals such as this one were not very amused by Shakespeare's public exposure of their witchcraft, and as punishment they decided to cast their own spell on the play Macbeth that still haunts it to this day.

Supposedly, just saying the name "Macbeth" inside a theater will bring bad luck to the play and anyone acting in it. The only exception is when the word is spoken as a line in the play.

Legend is to reverse the bad luck, the person who uttered the word must exit the theater, spin around three times saying a profanity, and then ask for permission to return inside. Other variations of this ritual involve spitting over your shoulders or simply letting out a stream of cuss words. Some say that you must repeat the words "Thrice around the circle bound, Evil sink into the ground," or you can turn to Will himself for assistance and cleanse the air with a quotation from Hamlet. Whatever steps that you choose to take, failing to do anything to prevent the curse from taking effect will ensure that you will in for some trouble. To avoid bringing up the curse in the first place, most people refer to Macbeth as one of it's several nicknames, with "the Scottish Play" seeming to be the most popular of them. Go up to any experienced actor and ask him about the Scottish Play, and he or she will almost certainly know exactly what you are talking about.

There is a further thread in that it was also at Hampton Court where in January 1604 that King James I convened the Hampton Court Conference where a new English version of the Holy Bible was conceived in response to the perceived problems of the earlier translations as detected by the Puritans, a faction within the Church of England.

Thought of the Day: After you ask for guidance–Listen! - Barbara Ann Kipfer

Whether you agree that successful revolutions have three phases as  Strafor believes or move through more or less  is of little moment. What is important is that Stratfor. a skilled private analyst group and others with knowledge and historical perspective see things in Iran similarly. This is my version of those developments as they stand today.

THINGS ON THE STREETS. Revolution succeed with a strategically located vocal, single or limited segment of society begins to express resentment, taking to the streets of a major city, usually the capital. This segment is joined by others in the city and by segments elsewhere. The  demonstrations spreads becomes more disruptive and even violent. As resistance to the regime spreads, the regime deploys force. Those forces, drawn from resisting social segments and isolated from the rest of society, turn on the regime, and stop following the regime's orders. This is what happened to the Shah of Iran in 1979; it is also what happened in Russia in 1917 or in Romania in 1989 and elsewhere.

Revolutions fail when no one joins that initial bunch, and they find themselves isolated. When the demonstrations do not spread they either peter out or the regime brings in the security and military forces-who frequently are hostile to the demonstrators-and use force to suppress the rising to the extent necessary. This is what happened in Tiananmen Square in China. The students who rose up were not joined by any others. and were crushed.

That is what is happening in Iran this week. The global media, obsessively focused on the initial demonstrators have repeatedly focused  on supporters of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's opponents because he is a acerbic stinker. But, they failed to notice that the demonstrations primarily consisted of the same type of people demonstrating. Amid the breathless reporting on the demonstrations, reporters failed to notice that the uprising was not spreading. They constantly interviewed English-speaking demonstrators, armed with smartphones or those little pen cameras supplied by a Southern California Iranian media outlet. The media did not recognize the signs of a failing revolution.

THE THEOCRACY. The Ayatollah Ali Khamenei spoke Friday and called out the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, they failed to understand that the troops-definitely not drawn from what we might call the "Twittering classes," would remain loyal to the regime for ideological and social reasons.

The troops are unsympathic to the demonstrators as a small-town boy might be to a Harvard postdoc. So  reporters have deluded themselves into thinking they were witnessing a general uprising. But this was not St. Petersburg in 1917 or Bucharest in 1989-it was Tiananmen Square.

CONFUSION AND WISHFUL THINKING. Outside Iran there is  confusion about basic facts. For example, it is said that the urban-rural distinction in Iran is not critical any longer. that implies Iran is homogeneous and the demonstrators are represent all Iranians that is patently false.. But the social difference between someone living in a small towns and someone living in Tehran are enormous. When I worked in Boston and new York folks were fond of looking down their noses at the great unwashed to the west of Subury and the Hudson respectively.

Tehran proper has about 8 million inhabitants; its suburbs bring it to about 13 million people out of Iran's total population of 70.5 million. or about 20 percent of Iran. Add in all other urbans center populations and you still havea great minority..  Inferences of social similarities between cities with 100,000 and 5 million are specious.  

Almost certainly vote fraud occurred, but, Ahmadinejad likely would have won without it. JFK beat Richard Nixon by less that a vote per precinct but tens of thousand of missing votes in Chicago carried the day. Nobody rioted, and Nixon when told the election was stolen refused to sue. Saying that would hurt the nation.

ELECTION NUMBERS.There are many questions including the speed of the vote count has been taken as a sign of fraud, as it should have been impossible to count votes that fast. Here are the numbers.

• 1. The polls closed at 7 p.m. but voting hours were extended until 10 p.m. in some place. sn line.
• 2. By 11:45 p.m. about 20 percent of the vote had been counted.
• 3. By 5:20 a.m. the next day, with almost all votes counted,
• 4. the election commission declared Ahmadinejad the winner.

The vote count thus took about seven hours about the same time it took in the U. S. in 2005, though reformists that claimed fraud back then did not stress the counting time in their allegations.

Iran has 47,000 voting stations, plus 14,000 roaming stations that travel from tiny village to tiny village, staying there for a short time before moving on. That creates 61,000 ballot boxes designed to receive roughly the same number of votes. That means each station would have been counting about 500 ballots, or about 70 votes per hour. With counting beginning at 10 p.m., So, they could easily have done it.

Some of the candidates didn't even carry their own provinces or districts. Al Gore didn't carry Tennessee in 2000. Ralph Nader didn't carry his home precinct an effect probably felt by the two smaller candidates in the Iranian election.

Mousavi didn't carry his own province is more interesting. Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett writing in Politico make some interesting points on this. As an ethnic Azeri, it was assumed that Mousavi would carry his Azeri-named and -dominated home province. But they also point out that Ahmadinejad also speaks Azeri, and made multiple campaign appearances in the district. They also point out that Khamenei is Azeri. In sum, winning that district was by no means certain for Mousavi, so losing it does not automatically signal fraud. It raised suspicions, but by no means was a smoking gun.

Almost certainly fraud occurred it does in every election. But, the fact is that Ahmadinejad's vote in 2009 was extremely close to his victory percentage in 2005.

NEXT PHASE. Critically the protesters have not joined by any of the tens of millions whose votes the protesters alleged were stolen. Why? In a complete hijacking of the election by some 13 million votes by an extremely unpopular candidate, you would expect all hell would break loose. But, it hasn't.   The demonstrations are actually comprised a small fraction of society.

Certainly  there are  tremendous tensions within the Iranian political elite. That no revolution broke out does not mean there isn't a crisis in the political elite, particularly among the clerics. But that crisis does not cut the way Western common sense would have it. Many of Iran's religious leaders see Ahmadinejad as hostile to their interests, threatening their financial prerogatives, and as taking international risks they don't want to take. Ahmadinejad's political popularity in fact rests on his populist hostility to what he sees as the corruption of the clerics and their families and his strong stand on Iranian national security issues.  Let's face It the Persians are a proud, tough bunch.

In fact the clerics are divided but, many wanted Ahmadinejad to lose to protect their own sweet heart deals - fancy homes, lots of bucks and perks and no accountability.

MEDIA MISH MASH. Western media misunderstood all this because they didn't understand that Ahmadinejad does not speak for the clerics but against them, that many of the clerics were working for his defeat, and that Ahmadinejad has enormous pull in the country's security apparatus.

Why? Because Western media bought into the concept of the stolen election, therefore they saw Ahmadinejad's support and the widespread dissatisfaction with the old clerical elite. The Western media simply didn't understand or care that the most traditional and pious segments of Iranian society support Ahmadinejad because he opposes the old ruling elite. Instead, they assumed this was like Prague or Budapest in 1989, with a broad-based uprising in favor of liberalism against an unpopular regime.

Tehran in 2009, however, was a struggle between two main factions, both of which supported the Islamic republic as it was. There were the clerics, who have dominated the regime since 1979 and had grown wealthy in the process. And there was Ahmadinejad, who felt the ruling clerical elite had betrayed the revolution with their personal excesses and many Iranians agree with him.And there also was the small faction the BBC and CNN kept focusing on-the demonstrators in the streets who want to dramatically liberalize the Islamic republic. This faction never stood a chance of taking power, whether by election or revolution. The two main factions used the third smaller faction in various ways, however. Ahmadinejad used it to make his case that the clerics who supported them, like Rafsanjani, would risk the revolution and play into the hands of the Americans and British to protect their own wealth. Meanwhile, Rafsanjani argued behind the scenes that the unrest was the tip of the iceberg, and that Ahmadinejad had to be replaced. Khamenei, an astute politician, examined the data and supported Ahmadinejad.

Now, as we saw after Tiananmen Square, we will see a reshuffling among the elite. Those who backed Mousavi will be on the defensive. By contrast, those who supported Ahmadinejad are in a powerful position. There is a massive crisis in the elite, but this crisis has nothing to do with liberalization: It has to do with power and prerogatives among the elite. Having been forced by the election and Khamenei to live with Ahmadinejad, some will make deals while some will fight-but Ahmadinejad is well-positioned to win this battle.

HOTDOG DIPLOMACY. Wednesday Khamenei was resolute in supporting the election outcome. Demonstrations are clearly being suppressed. Whether a general strike will be effective will be telling. If not the so-called "revolution" is ended. Optimism is waning. Obama has now disinvited Iranian diplomats to attend 4^th of July celebrations at American embassies around the world. Initially Obama said the invitation was still exetneded which was another confusing signal. What impact, if any this reversal in "hotdog diplomacy" remains to be seen.

Stratfor is a private intelligence company delivering in-depth analysis, assessments and forecasts on global geopolitical, economic, security and public policy issues. A variety of subscription-based access, free intelligence reports and confidential consulting are available for individuals and corporations.

Military affairs specialists say General Motors' plans to sell its Hummer vehicle division to China making it a CHummer and raising new concerns about the transfer of valuable military vehicle technology.

The Hummer is the civilian version of the front-line U.S. military vehicle widely used since the 1990s and the replacement to the World War II era Jeep.

Richard Fisher, of the International Assessment and Strategy Center, says "Multiple versions of the Hummer are produced by two Chinese companies already, and AM General already sells parts to one of them," Fisher said.

"The PLA already buys their Hummers for PLA Airborne units and for police units across China. All that's left is for Congress to appropriate monies to give uparmored Humvees to the PLA and order the U.S. Army to buy Chinese-made Hummers."

Calls flooded the Pentagon, Capital Hill and AM General following reports of the sale to China.

Steve Clawson, a spokesman for South Bend, Indiana-based AM General, said the military and civilian programs are separate.

"GM's proposed sale of the civilian Hummer brand would have no impact on the military Humvee program," he said.

The Wall Street Journal identified the Chinese buyer, Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery, as a major company in China that is seeking to break into the U.S. market with the Hummer purchase.

The deal may be blocked by U.S. regulators, the Journal noted, noting that Sichuan is the location where China's military vehicles are built, raising concerns that the Hummer will boost the PLA.

China's state-run industries do not distinguish between civilian and military manufacturing. Often factories that make refrigerators also make missiles and other weaponry.

God, grant me the senility to forget the people I never liked anyway, the good fortune to run into the ones that I do like, and the eyesight to tell the difference.

Benign Neglect as Immigration Policy Obama has found a new way to handle the problem of America's 12 to 20 million illegal immigrants- ignore them, says American Spectator's George Wittman.  Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano has decided that the best way to deal with the negative aspects of this sensitive issue is to shove it off on local officials, city, state and federal. Out of sight, out of the media, out of mind, she thinks.There is a continuing campaign by various Latino groups, among others, that local police harass illegal immigrants. In the mind of these activists, the fact that these individuals are suspected of being here in the United States illegally is not adequate reason to abridge their "civil rights" by seeking to determine if they are legal or not..Harassment, by the way, means that often immigrants are stopped by police for apparently minor infractions, and are held on that charge while being checked through ICE (acronym for the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement arm). This is not a uniform circumstance. Border states such as California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas have towns and cities that differ widely on local laws in regard to informing ICE of their police contact with possible "illegals." Napolitano's Department of Homeland Security stays as far away as possible from becoming involved in these discontinuities.

Within local law enforcement, depending on the judgment of the officer, there is also often a wide range of application of the same local laws. The Latino community in California, the Southwest, Florida, and elsewhere with large Hispanic immigrant populations has the ability to apply considerable local political pressure to protect "immigrant rights" of those who are documented or undocumented. Local law enforcement responds accordingly.

Secretary Napolitano's logic appears to be that the more local officials are tasked with the major portion of the burden of dealing with the presence of illegals in their communities, the less negative political fallout will occur on the Obama and Napolitano.. Her entire approach to illegal immigration is to do everything possible to nullify the broader political effects of the legal and security aspects of ultimately millions of people pouring into the United States.

What is particularly curious is that Napolitano went to great trouble when she first took on her new assignment to de-emphasize countering the foreign-sponsored terrorist aspects of her job while making a priority of the economic and social impact of the growing problem of the "undocumented." Apparently that approach now has been relegated to local domestic concern.Placing the weight of enforcement of the first phase of illegal immigration laws on local police is theoretically not inappropriate - although it does conspicuously add to their workload. Local cops are the ones best acquainted with their communities. A relatively quick assessment of non-English speakers by local law enforcement can differentiate between those with community ties and those without.

The legally ticklish problem of "profiling" is a matter in which Sec. Napolitano does not want to become involved. Better leave that hot button issue to the people on the front lines to take the heat. She knows full well that cops "profile" suspects in many ways during their everyday assignments. Of course they are going to be attracted first by people of Mexican or Central American background. It's perhaps unfortunate, but these nationals make up the core of illegal entrants.

With Obama pounding his universal health care plan down Congress' throats and the acknowledged fact that perhaps a third of the reportedly 47 million uninsured are illegal alients and now the Congressional Budget Office pegging its cost at $1.6 trillion that mean taxpayers are going to have to cough up a half trillion dollars to cover them.

The pro-immigrant groups believe that asking non-English speakers to prove they are in the U.S. legally is discrimination.

A Sunday school teacher was discussing the Ten Commandments with her five and six year olds. After explaining the commandment to 'honor thy father and thy mother' she asked, "Is there a commandment that teaches us how to treat our brothers and sisters?"

Without missing a beat one little boy answered, "Thou shalt not kill."

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad warned  the United States and Britain on Sunday not to interfer in the Islamic Republic's internal affairs, the ISNA ( Iranians news agency) was cited by Reuters as saying. Sunday morning ISNA said 17 have been killed and 100 injured.

A picture in Sunday's Jerusalem Post  shows Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, listening to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's speech with  judiciary chief Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi and parliament speaker Ali Larijani sit, during Friday prayers.

Also on Sunday the BBC speculates that the protests in Iran are slowly being suffocated as more and more troops and militia are massed to suppress public anti government displays. There are rumors of strikes being encouraged for as early as Monday.

Ahmadinejad has been quoted as warning, "Definitely by hasty remarks you will not be placed in the circle of friendship with the Iranian nation. Therefore I advise you to correct your interfering stances," Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying in a meeting with clerics and scholars.

Many Western countries have criticized the election, which was won by Ahmadinejad according to official figures, and its aftermath. His main opponent, moderate Mir Hossein Mousavi, says the vote was rigged. The government denied the charges.

Also Sunday, Iran's Parliament reiterated warnings sounded by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in which he said that leaders of the US, UK, France and Germany must not to interfere in the country's internal affairs, threatening that Iran would respond to such meddling "in other fields."

Obama has remained measured in his comments about the Iranian protests sparking criticism that he is too partial to Islam and not nearly supportive enough of the anti-government forces. For his part Obama said he did not want the U. S. to become a "foil" for Iran's theocracy - but, that appears to already have happened.

For its part the The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the Islamist shock troops in charge of Iran's nuclear arms program, has said Obama's speech in Cairo legitimized Iran's nuclear program.

IRGC paramilitary unit Qods Force, says that Obama's comments about the Iranians having a right to the peaceful use of nuclear power indicate the president "acknowledged Iran's nuclear right within the framework of the NPT; he must show this in practice." 

"The dignified foreign policies of the ninth government forced him to officially acknowledge Iran's nuclear right and asked for negotiations with Iran without preconditions," Kowsari said. "Obama's presence in the Middle East and in the Islamic countries was because America wanted to support Saudi Arabia and Egypt and also wanted to send a limited verbal signal to Iran."

Sunday Senator John McCain regretted Obama has not taken a stronger stance on opposing suppression of Iranian "human rights." He lamented Obama's tepid leadership. On Friday the U. S. Congress reaffirmed its conviction that people have the right to peaceful protest. He said America has a moral obligation and faces the same responsibility now as during the Cold War he cited Daniel Webster and JFK who pledged to "go anywhere and bear any burden" in the pursuit of freedom.

Hanging over the entire Iranian issue are oil prices that have recently been driven up by speculators and the fear of a spike deep into three figures resulting in $4-$5 per gallon gasoline prices in the U. S. is the wheels coime off in Iran. That would bring economic recovery to a screeching halt. So far the Iranian dustup has not impacted oil prices primarily because there is a glut which of course raises the issue of the 51-day run up on per gallon prices - that's another story.

Left-wing activists who want political show trials of Bush administration officials over War on Terror policies get their funding from George Soros. A search Capital Research Center conducted to find the domain name registration record for a new pressure group called the Commission on Accountability revealed that the group's website address, commissiononaccountability.org, was reserved for Soros by Blue State Digital, LLC, a research and media firm that BusinessWeek last summer called Obama's "secret weapon." At least eight of the 19 left-leaning institutional members of the Commission -including the Constitution Project and Human Rights Watch- are funded by the secretive Soros.

California's unemployment rate has risen from 6.5% a year ago to 11.5% in May fully 2% higher than the national unemployment rate of 9.5%. California's unemployemtn was 4.8% in 2007. Most expect unemployment to exceed 10% nationally and California could top 14%.

California's budget disaster is so serious the state is talking about ending welfare payments to more than 2 million people, mostly women with children.

Only Rhode Island and South Carolina at 12.1%; Oregon at 12.4% and Michigan at 14.1% exceed the percentage of those out of work in California. Nebraska and North Dakota have the nation's lowest unemployment rate at 4.4%.

The criticism about Obama's timid approach to Iran is spreading faster than the Iranian protest and includes unflattering comments from the protesters themselves.

Turns out the US is paying Paleu $12 million per Uigher a total of $240 million in "aide." to take them from Gitmo.

AP reports four Guantanamo Bay detainees, part of a group of Chinese Muslims, have been resettled in luxury in Bermuda with U. S. taxpayers paying the bill.

Abdul Nasser, one of the four detainees who landed in Bermuda early Thursday morning, issued a statement through his lawyers, saying: "Growing up under communism we always dreamed of living in peace and working in free society like this one. Today you have let freedom ring."

It's the first time since 2006 that the U.S. has successfully resettled any of Guantanamo's population of Uighurs (WEE'-gurs), whose fate has been wending through the courts for years. The U.S. government had determined that they weren't enemy combatants and should be released. But China resisted their release, contending they were part of a Chinese separatist movement, and it had been unclear where they would go free.

The Uighur detainees are from a Chinese region that borders several Central Asian nations, including Afghanistan and Pakistan, where they were captured in 2001. Thirteen other Uighurs remain to be freed from Guantanamo.

The Justice Department on Thursday issued a statement thanking the government of Bermuda for helping resettle four of the detainees. Arrangements are being made for other Uighurs to be sent to the Pacific island nation of Palau.

It is strongly believed that Bermuda's and Palau's acceptance of the Uighurs came at a very high price to American taxpayers.

The Uighurs' lawyers said they will be part of Bermuda's guest worker program.

"We will consult regularly with the government of Bermuda on the status of these individuals," said Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd.

One U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to discuss negotiations between the two nations, said the four would not be allowed to travel to the United States without prior approval from American authorities.

The departure of the four detainees for Bermuda - a British territory - leaves 234 detainees remaining at Guantanamo, and comes in a busy week at the military base in Cuba including:.

1. On Tuesday morning, authorities brought detainee Ahmed Ghailani to New York to face trial in civilian court for the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa. And the president of Palau said his nation will take some Uighurs.

2. At the same time comes news that combatants will and in fact are being read Miranda rights when captured that muist leave them and certainly our troops scratching their heads. The Miranda warning says,"

• You have the right to remain silent and refuse to answer questions. Do you understand?
• Anything you do say may be used against you in a court of law. Do you understand?
• You have the right to consult an attorney before speaking to the police and to have an attorney present during questioning now or in the future. Do you understand?
• If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you before any questioning if you wish. Do you understand?
• If you decide to answer questions now without an attorney present you will still have the right to stop answering at any time until you talk to an attorney. Do you understand?
• Knowing and understanding your rights as I have explained them to you, are you willing to answer my questions without an attorney present?

No one is explaining what happens if a captive says they do not understand their rights but, it is clear American taxpayers will get the bill for lawyers.

The Uighurs are a unique group among the Guantanamo detainees. A federal judge ordered last year that they be released in the United States, but an appeals court overruled that decision. U.S. officials would not return them to China out of concerns they would be tortured or executed.

Albania accepted five Uighurs from Guantanamo in 2006, but declined to take more. Many nations have said no to receiving the Uighurs, out of concerns that doing so would anger the Chinese government.

Uighurs are from Xinjiang, an isolated region that borders Afghanistan, Pakistan and six Central Asian nations. They say they have been repressed by the Chinese government. China long has said that insurgents are leading an Islamic separatist movement in Xinjiang.

At one point, officials had considered bringing some of the Uighurs to Virginia, but the possibility provoked intense opposition in Congress, and the plan was shelved.

Nobody told the UK that the US would send four Gitmo detainees to Bermuda - its protectorate. The Brits are disquieted by Obama's arrogance or what some say is something worse. Bermuda's parliament is unhappy. Now Bermuda's majority party is saying they will only be there temporarily aftrer becoming citizens they are free to leave including China were they are wanted for capital crimes and could be executed.

  Running on a slogan "Deeds Not Words" R. Creigh Deeds (D), a longtime Virginia legislator from rural Bath County, won a stunning come-from-behind victory in the Democratic primary for Virginia governor overwhelming a pair of better-funded and better-positioned opponents.  Deeds stomped Washington DC insider Terry McAuliffe and Brian Moran getting more votes than their combined totals sweeping 11 of its 12 Congressional districts including Moran's father's district. Observers say it is a litmus test that shows BIG shift in last 6 months.

Deeds, 51, will face Republican Robert F. McDonnell in a general election battle that amounts to a rematch of the race for attorney general four years ago, which McDonnell barely won after a late surge by Deeds.

Republicans hungry for a victory think they see light at the end of the tunnel will spend millions of dollars in Virginia to try to win back the governor's mansion as the nation watches. Obama and Virginia Governor Kaine both see Virginia as a litmus test for liberal White House policies. In recent weeks Republicans have taken the lead among voters who trust them more on economic and hence job issues. That surge is part of Obama's latest campaign to prove his liberal spending agenda is working.

Moran was the early favorite until McAuliffe jumped in pulling him left to support the homosexual agenda, and to oppose off shore oil drilling, for instance and tossing the door open for Deeds who stayed closer to the middle.  McAuliffe and Moran worked aggressively to push back against the surging Deeds by reminding voters of his right-leaning record, which included support for allowing concealed weapons in restaurants that serve alcohol and opposition to a ban on restricting handgun purchases to one a month. Perhaps that devided the liberal vote between them and Deeds squirted out.

Northern Virginia, around Washington DC, is peopled by largely liberal federal workers while the southern and more rural areas are much more conservative. In any case it promises to be a dustup this Fall.

What's becoming increasingly clear is that Americans are surly about federal borrowing and spending and don't think Obama's "stimulaus plan is working. Forty-five percent (45%) of Americans say the rest of the new government spending authorized in the $787-billion economic stimulus plan should now be canceled. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that just 36% disagree and 20% are not sure.

 According to news reports, only $36 billion of the stimulus plan had been spent as of late May and it is increasingly seens as an bankrupting boondoogle.

During his fast-moving two days stay in the Middle East, crowned by a speech from Cairo to the world's Muslims on June 4, Obama pursued some practical politicking behind the scenes. His private talks with Saudi King Abdullah and overnight stay in Riyadh June 3 and his conversation with Hosni Mubarak at the presidential Quba palace the next day cemented a new coalition between the US, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

 

This was the first strategic bond ever signed by those three nations as a combined front for combating Islamic radicalism, chiefly al Qaeda and Taliban, and applying the brakes to Iran's drive for a nuclear weapon. Osama bin Laden was quick to respond by warning Muslims that "alliances with Christians and Jews would turn them into apostates."

 

For all three allies, it is a major transformation, but most of all for Israel, from whom Obama proposes to minimize America's strategic ties. This means that the US president and his advisers intend to start cutting down on their military and intelligence discourse with Israel. Instead of conferring with Israel on its military and undercover moves the Middle East and Muslim world, Washington will make Cairo and Riyadh the crux of its regional team, only turning to Jerusalem when unavoidable.

 

Administration leaders have opted for this policy reorientation because they seek to enter into negotiations with Iran unencumbered by Israeli baggage. Close US ties with the Jewish state are also seen as a burden in Obama's prospective diplomatic engagements with Arab and Muslim governments such as Syria, which he wants to see harnessed to his new Arab line-up. Should Israel suffer or even cease to exists seems of only limited interest to Obama.

 

When he said in his epic speech "America will align its policies with those who seek peace," he was saying that his hands are free to henceforth pick and choose US allies without being bound by the past.

A 35 year old unemployed mortgage worker from Southern California had the luck of his life this week: he hit the jackpot twice in two days. Sean Sanders won $1,400 from Tuesday night's California Lottery draw while there, he checked his Mega Millions ticket and found he had won an additional $141,519. Californias tax collectors are reportedly stalking him with a tax bill.

In perhaps the biggest foreign policy shift in six decades and after repeated snubs and waffling by Obama Israel and Russia are holding " exploratory" talks on weapons exports with the goal of resolving differences and potentially enhancing strategic cooperation.

Officials said the Kremlin has agreed to an Israeli offer to inform the Jewish state of the weapons requests by such countries as Iran, Lebanon and Syria.

"It is very important for us to elaborate a single approach on arms supplies to our regions the Middle East and the Caucasus," Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said.

Lieberman met Kremlin leaders during his visit to Moscow on June 2 in what officials said marked the most serious Israeli effort to improve strategic cooperation with Russia.

Lieberman, a Russian native and fluent in the language, has advocated strong ties with Moscow amid the expected decline in U.S. relations with the Jewish state.

Officials said both Israel and Russia have complained of the arms policies of the other. Israel has cited Russia's desire to sell weapons and nuclear technology to Iran and Syria, while Moscow has been angered by Israeli military supplies to Georgia. Those supplies have largely been part of a cooperation with the US to keep Georgia in place as a democracy on Russia's southern border that sits astride it major Caspian gas pipeline going from Eeast to West.

This is bad news for Georgia, presuimably the U. S. and good news for Russia that seems determined to unravel western relations with it. Under the proposed framework, Israel and Russia would consult on any arms sales to rival and hostile states. Officials said Israel severed the flow of weapons to Georgia since the brief war with Russia in August 2008.

In April, officials said, the Kremlin suspended plans to sell at least six MiG-31 fighter-jets to Syria. They said the Russian decision came after numerous requests by Israel and the United States.

During Lieberman's visit, Israel and Russia agreed to continue cooperation in the realm of space and satellites. Israel has used the Russian Cosmodrome in Baikonur, Kazakhstan for the launch of dual-use satellites.

"Foreign Minister Liberman and his hosts discussed Israeli-Russian relations and agreed to continue promoting economic ties between the two states and cooperation in the realms of space technology and hi-tech, cultural cooperation, and the international law for the protection of investments," an Israeli Foreign Ministry statement said on June 3.

Meanwhile, Obama has refused to commit to major weapons deals with or technology transfer to Israel including sale of the F-22 or F-35 stealth fighters. Those warpalnes are believed to be capable of penetrating Iran's Russian supplied air defense network. .

"The requests are being thoroughly examined for their impact on U.S. national security," and could take months - in other words "No."an administration source said.

Israel's requests were discussed by Defense Minister Ehud Barak during his visit to Washington in early June. On June 4, Barak met Defense Secretary Robert Gates and senior Pentagon officials in a discussion on Iran and U.S. military assistance to Israel.

"Secretary Gates assured Minister Barak that the U.S. is prepared to continue on-going dialogue regarding our security assistance and cooperation with Israel to address common challenges," the Pentagon said in a statement.

But the sources said Gates did not commit to any Israeli request for advanced U.S. airborne platforms, weapons and other systems. The sources said a key issue was whether these sales would bolster Israel's capability to threaten Iran amid a U.S. reconciliation effort with the Teheran regime.

Israel, which received $2.4 billion in U.S. aid in 2009, has also sought to purchase at least six AH-64 Apache Longbow attack helicopters for the air force. The sources said the Israeli request has been submitted for an interagency review to determine the Longbow's impact on any Israeli attack on the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The Apache was extensively used by the Israel Air Force in the 22-day war with the Hamas regime in the Gaza Strip in early 2009. The sources said the administration was dismayed by the use of the helicopters in attacks in which Palestinian civilians were killed.

Barak and Gates discussed the Israeli requests during a private meeting at the Pentagon. "The two defense leaders met in private before joining senior advisers to discuss a range of security issues," the Pentagon said.

The sources said Barak has also urged the Pentagon to approve an Israeli request to install indigenous electronic warfare systems in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. So far, the United States has insisted that the JSF platform would not be modified for export clients.

The administration was not expected to approve major U.S. arms sales until Israel accepted Obama's plan to end all Jewish construction in the West Bank, launch talks with Syria and agree to establish a Palestinian state. In mid-June, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was scheduled to address Obama's demands in what was billed a major speech.

"Right now, it is safe to say that the Palestinian issue has topped our strategic agenda [with Israel]," the source said.

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.– Ralph Waldo Emerson

  The Iranian-backed Shi'ite forces are engaged in a military buildup in Iraq and are stockpiling weapons watching the U. S. pullout.  Shi'ite forces financed and sponsored by Iran are accelerating weapons acquisition to prepare for a civil war in Iraq. Shi'ite militias, particularly the Mahdi Army, have concluded that the weapons would be required against Sunni forces financed by Saudi Arabia in a renewed power struggle.

"Right now, everybody is waiting to see whether and how fast the United States withdraws from Iraq," an official said. "From that point on, the fighting for control begins."

On June 1, Iraqi police were reported to have captured one of its biggest weapons caches in Shi'ite areas of Iraq. The police seized a cache that contained 50 surface-to-air missiles and 10 improvised explosive devices in the province of Thi Qar.

"The cache was found on Monday morning in the Bherat area of Suqal Shyukh suburb, 30 kilometers south of Nasseriya," a police statement said. "The cache consisted of 50 air defense missiles and 10 roadside bombs."

Nasseriya, located 360 kilometers south of Baghdad, has been regarded as an emerging stronghold of the Mahdi Army. Mahdi, headed by Shi'ite cleric Moqtada Sadr, has been challenged by the traditional Shi'ite leadership aligned with other elements in Iran.

Officials said Shi'ite militias have been intensifying the smuggling of weapons from neighboring Iran in 2009 to prepare for the power vaccum expected to result from the U.S. military withdrawal. The U.S. military has been committed to withdrawing from all Iraqi cities by June 30.

In a related report the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that Iran has expanded its operational gas centrifuge fleet to nearly 5,000.

The agency said the increase in the centrifuge fleet has hampered efforts to monitor Iranian nuclear activity. In a report, IAEA said the centrifuges enabled Iran to increase its stockpile by 500 kilograms of enriched uranium in 2009 to reach a total of 1,339 kilograms.

In all, Iran has reported the operation of 4,920 centrifuges, with another 2,132 machines installed and undergoing vacuum tests. The figure marked a 25 percent increase in centrifuges since Obama took office.

The total number of centrifuges at the Natanz uranium enrichment center has reached 7,231. Iran plans to operate 54,000 centrifuges for an industrial nuclear fuel program.

Between Jan. 15 and May 23, 54 kilograms of UF6 was fed into the 10-machine IR-3 cascade, the 10-machine IR-2 cascade and single IR-1, IR-2, IR-2 modified, IR-3 and IR-4 centrifuges at Natanz. The rate of fuel enrichment was said not to have exceeded five percent.

The report said Iran continued to hamper agency inspection efforts. On May 19, IAEA said, Iran did not allow an inspection team to enter Natanz because of a security exercise. Since August 2008, Teheran has also banned inspectors from the IR-40 heavy nuclear reactor at Arak.

In as much as all four major candidates in Iran's recent presidential election supported continuing its nuclear program it is unlikely anything with change in its pursuit.

Ironically some are saying that Obama's Cairo speech likely hardened the position of Iran's ruling Mullahs' and could even have contributed to what many now see as manipulated results resulting in a "landslide" by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Rachmanism (RAK-muh-niz-uhm) noun: The exploitation and intimidation of tenants by landlords. After Peter Rachman (1919-1962), a landlord in London who became notorious for unethical practices including driving out tenants to maximize revenue from his rental properties.

Whether the haters are left handed or right hand thread wingnuts does not matters - all are dangerously wrong. - as the murder yesterday at the holocaust museum shows. Consider the following:

• Environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in 2007 declared that skeptics of global warming hysteria are guilty of "treason."
• NASA's James Hansen said climate skeptics should be put on trial for "high crimes against humanity."
• And Kennedy recently called coal companies "criminal enterprises" and said their CEO's should be jailed "for all of eternity."

Now a global warming alarmist has taken the vitriol to new heights, calling for the execution of global warming deniers.

The alarmist, identified only as "The Insolent Braggart," posted an entry on Talking Points Memo, an often-cited Web site. TPM removed the entry from the site, but not before it came to the attention of Marc Morano of Climate Depot.

He reproduced the entry on his Web site: Use caution here because we do not know whether this person lives in a rubber room; on an isolated mountain top or at the bottom of a deep mine.

"At what point do we jail or execute global warming deniers? … "So when the right-wing [expletive deleted] have caused it to be too late to fix the problem, and we start seeing the devastating consequences and we start seeing end of the world type events - how will we punish those responsible? It will be too late. So shouldn't we start punishing them now?"

The Washington Examiner cited the TPM poster in an editorial headlined, "Is American politics becoming a hate sport?"

The editorial likened the poster to Scott Roeder, who is charged with killing abortion doctor George "Killer" Tiller, and John Brown, the abolitionist who led a murderous raid before the Civil War. Laast week al Qaeda called on disaffected American militants to join its jihad as it warned of a bioweapon attacks on America. Even on this website there is occasional hatespeak - thankfully rare and usually discredited - but any is too much.

"Are Brown, Roeder, and the TPM  poster simply lone fanatics," the Examiner asked,  "isolated illustrations of what happens when political concerns become warped beyond reason and combine with unstable personality characteristics to produce gruesome results?

On Tuesday, NBC's news special "Inside the Obama White House" was watched by 9 million people. Historians say it was the most revealing look behind the scenes at the White House since Bill Clinton set up a secret Web cam–Letterman

 Had I not been such a dumbbell I'd have completed my studies in theoretical mathematics rather than jumping to engineering "where the money was" and been part of such breathtaking discoveries. Alas we do not get do-overs. So, I perch here on the sidelines of science a dullard to marvel

Ohio State University doesn't just have a great football team, and not everyone there are knuckle draggers either researchers there have found a relatively simple way to measure distances to objects three times farther away in outer space than previously possible, by extending a common measurement technique. They discovered that a rare type of giant star, often overlooked by astronomers, could make an excellent signpost for distances up to 300 million light-years - and beyond.

Along the way, they also learned something new about how these stars evolve.

Cepheid variables - giant stars that pulse in brightness - have long been used as reference points for measuring distances in the nearby universe, said Jonathan Bird, doctoral student in astronomy at Ohio State. Classical cepheids are bright, but beyond 100 million light-years from Earth, their signal gets lost among other bright stars.

In a press briefing at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Pasadena, CA, Bird revealed that a rare and even brighter class of cepheid - one that pulses very slowly - can potentially be used as a beacon to measure distances three times farther than their classical counterparts.

This project is the latest in principal investigator Krzysztof Stanek's effort to gauge the size and age of the universe with greater precision.

There are several methods for calculating the distance to stars, and astronomers often have to combine methods to indirectly measure a distance. The usual analogy is a ladder, with each new method a higher rung above another. At each new rung of the cosmic distance ladder, the errors add up, reducing the precision of the overall measurement. So any single method that can skip the rungs of the ladder is a prized tool for probing the universe.

Stanek, professor of astronomy at Ohio State, applied a direct measurement technique in 2006, when he used the light emerging from a binary star system in the galaxy M33 to measure the distance to that galaxy for the first time. M33 is 3 million light-years from Earth.

This new technique using so-called "ultra long period cepheids" (ULP cepheids) is different. It's an indirect method, but this initial study suggests that the method would work for galaxies that are much farther away than M33.

"We found ultra long period cepheids to be a potentially powerful distance indicator. We believe they could provide the first direct stellar distance measurements to galaxies in the range of 50-100 megaparsecs (150 million - 326 million light-years) and well beyond that," Stanek said.

Because researchers generally don't take note of ultra long period cepheids, there are few of them in the astronomical record. For this study, Stanek, Bird, and Ohio State doctoral student Jose Prieto uncovered 18 ULP cepheids from the literature.

Each was located in a nearby galaxy, such as the Small Magellanic Cloud. The distances to these nearby galaxies are well known, so the astronomers used that knowledge to calibrate the distance to the ULP cepheids.

They found that they could use ULP cepheids to determine distance with a 10-20 percent error - a rate typical of other methods that make up the cosmic distance ladder.

"We hope to reduce that error as more people take note of ULP cepheids in their stellar surveys," Bird said. "What we've shown so far is that the method works in principle, and the results are encouraging."

Bird explained why astronomers have ignored ULP cepheids in the past.

Short period cepheids, those that brighten and dim every few days, make good distance markers in space because their period is directly related to their brightness - and astronomers can use that brightness information to calculate the distance. Polaris, the North Star, is a well known and classical cepheid.

But astronomers have always thought that ULP cepheids, which brighten and dim over the course of a few months or longer, don't obey this relation. They are larger and brighter than the typical cepheid. In fact, they are larger and brighter than most stars; in this study, for example, the 18 ULP cepheids ranged in size from 12-20 times the mass of our Sun.

The brightness makes them good distance markers, Stanek said. Typical cepheids are harder to spot in distant galaxies, as their light blends in with other stars. ULP cepheids are bright enough to stand out.

Astronomers have also long suspected that ULP cepheids don't evolve the same way as other cepheids. In this study, however, the Ohio State team found the first evidence of a ULP cepheid evolving as a more classical cepheid does.

A classical cepheid will grow hotter and cooler many times over its lifetime. In-between, the outer layers of the star become unstable, which causes the changes in brightness. ULP cepheids are thought to go through this period of instability only once, and going in only one direction - from hotter to cooler.

But as the astronomers pieced together data from different parts of the literature for this study, they discovered that one of the ULP cepheids - a star in the Small Magellanic Cloud dubbed HV829 - is clearly moving in the opposite direction.

Forty years ago, HV829 pulsed every 87.6 days. Now it pulses every 84. 4 days. Two other measurements found in the literature confirm that the period has been shrinking steadily in the decades in between, which indicates that the star itself is shrinking, and getting hotter.

The astronomers concluded that ULP cepheids may help astronomers not only measure the universe, but also learn more about how very massive stars evolve.

Some of these results were reported in the Astrophysical Journal in April 2009. Since that paper was written, the Ohio State astronomers have started using the Large Binocular Telescope in Tucson, Arizona, to look for more ULP cepheids. Stanek says that they've found a few good candidates in the galaxy M81, but those results have yet to be confirmed.

Charles Boycott (1832-1897), a British land agent in Ireland, whose mistreatment of tenants resulted in his getting ostracized, i.e. he was boycotted - hence the popular usage.

A generation ago, the unapologetic liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) cited GM as proof that free market competition couldn't work because no auto company could take on General Motors and win - how things have changed.

 Now only 42% of those who currently own a General Motors car are even somewhat likely to buy a GM product for their next car. That figure includes just 30% who are Very Likely to do so.

 The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 43% of current GM owners are not likely to buy another GM car, while 16% are not sure.

Democrats who own GM cars are somewhat more likely than others to buy their next car from GM.

This data is the latest evidence of how steep a hill GM must climb as it hopes to increase sales and return to profitability. Only six percent (6%) of non-GM owners are now Very Likely to buy from GM.

Overall, among all adults, 16% say they are Very Likely to buy their next car from GM. That figure is slightly below the auto giant's current share of the domestic auto market.

Another 10% of all adults are somewhat likely to buy from GM while 60% are not likely to do so.

 Younger adults, those under 40, are less likely than their elders to consider a GM product for their next car. Younger buyers in general tend to favor import names for cars and other products.

The government bailout and takeover of General Motors remains very unpopular among the public. Just 26% of Americans believe the bailout was a good idea, and nearly as many support a boycott of GM products.

 Fifty-one percent (51%) of Americans nationwide say they are now more likely to buy a Ford since that company did not take any bailout funding. Only 12% are less likely to buy from Ford.

 There is an interesting political twist to the attitudes about buying GM. Currently, among those who hold populist or Mainstream political views, 46% own a GM car. But just 15% of those in the Mainstream are Very Likely to buy their next car from GM.

Among those with Political Class views, 22% currently own a GM car, but 24% of the Political Class say it's Likely that a GM product will be their next car. This may be a case of the Political Class expressing its support for the bailouts.

 General Motors currently makes Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet and GMC. Its Opel, Pontiac, Saturn, Saab and Hummer have or are being sold or will be discontinued.

 General Motors was once the world's largest corporation, and its share of the U.S. auto market at one point exceeded 50%.

 In dealing with the current economic crisis, most Americans now worry that the government will do too much rather than too little. Americans overwhelmingly believe that Big Government and Big Business are on the same team working against the interests of consumers and investors.

 This poll tracks with now a majority of people who worry about and oppose Obama's economic stimular plan - specifically worrying about borrowing too much - for his social experiments.

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory - John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006)

California continues to spasm as the Governor and Legislature rearrange the deck chairs on the "Titanic" - like state.

U.S. counterterrorism officials have authenticated a video by an al-Qaida recruiter threatening to smuggle a biological weapon into the United States via tunnels under the Mexico border, the latest sign of the terrorist group's determination to stage another mass-casualty attack on the U.S. homeland.

The video aired as a recruitment tool makes clear that al-Qaida is looking to exploit weaknesses in U.S. border security and also is willing to ally itself with white militia groups or other anti-government entities interested in carrying out an attack inside the United States, according to counterterrorism officials interviewed by The Washington Times.

The officials, who spoke only on the condition they not be named because of the sensitive nature of their work, stressed that there is no credible information that al-Qaida has acquired the capabilities to carry out a mass biological attack although its members have clearly sought the expertise.

The video first aired by the Arabic news network Al Jazeera in February and later posted to several Web sites shows Kuwaiti dissident Abdullah al-Nafisi telling a room full of supporters in Bahrain that al-Qaida is casing the U.S. border with Mexico to assess how to send terrorists and weapons into the U.S.

"Four pounds of anthrax - in a suitcase this big - carried by a fighter through tunnels from Mexico into the U.S. are guaranteed to kill 330,000 Americans within a single hour if it is properly spread in population centers there," the recruiter said. "What a horrifying idea; 9/11 will be small change in comparison. Am I right? There is no need for airplanes, conspiracies, timings and so on. One person, with the courage to carry 4 pounds of anthrax, will go to the White House lawn, and will spread this 'confetti' all over them, and then we'll do these cries of joy. It will turn into a real celebration."

In the video, obtained and translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute, al-Nafisi also suggests that al-Qaida might want to collaborate with members of native U.S. white supremacist militias who hate the federal government.

Sean Smith, a spokesman for Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, said the U.S. takes such threats seriously.

Drug Enforcement Administration and Defense Department officials have been paying close attention to links between various terrorist organizations, such as Hezbollah, and drug cartels in South America, Central America and Mexico.

In the video, al-Nafisi emphasized that al-Qaida had chemical laboratories in Afghanistan prior to the U.S. invasion. He described his admiration for Hezbollah and said that al-Qaida continues to have scientists and resources at its disposal.

"The Americans are afraid that the [weapons of mass destruction] might fall into the hands of 'terrorist' organizations like al-Qaida and others," he told followers. "There is good reason for the Americans' fears. … [al-Qaida] had laboratories in north Afghanistan. They have scientists, chemists and nuclear physicists. They are nothing like they are portrayed by these mercenary journalists - backward Bedouins living in caves. No, no, by no means. This kind of talk can fool only naive people. People who follow such things know that al-Qaida has laboratories, just like Hezbollah."

Intelligence officials said the video provides important insights into al-Qaida recruitment methods and views of the West.

In the 10-minute clip, al-Nafisi suggested that al-Qaida might want to make common cause with what he claimed are "300,000" members of white supremacist and other militias in the U.S.

"These militias even think about bombing nuclear plants within the U.S.," he said. "May God grant them success, even though we are not white, or even close to it, right? They have plans to bomb the nuclear plant at Lake Michigan. This plant is very important. … May God grant success to one of these militia leaders, who is thinking about bombing this plant. I believe that we should devote part of our prayers to him."

Anthrax is one of the oldest recorded diseases of grazing animals such as sheep and cattle and is believed to be the Sixth Plague mentioned in the Book of Exodus in the Bible. Anthrax is also mentioned by Homer (in The Iliad), Virgil (Georgics), and Hippocrates.

Until the twentieth century, anthrax infections killed hundreds and thousands of animals and people each year in Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and Southern Vietnam, specifically in the concentration camps during WWI, and North America. French scientist Louis Pasteur developed the first effective vaccine for anthrax in 1881. That and the proper disposal of infected animals greatly reduced the incidence.

Its spores exists worldwide; can be replicated in bio-labs. Anthrax was first tested as a biological warfare agent by Unit 731 of the Japanese Kwantung Army in Manchuria during the 1930s; some of this testing involved intentional infection of prisoners of war, thousands of whom died. The Soviets, Chinese, U. S. and others have researched the use of anthrax as a weapons.

Despite signing the 1972 agreement to end bioweapon production the Soviet Union had an active bioweapons program. On April 2, 1979 an accidental release or antrax from a bioweapons facility 850 miles east of Moscow killed six dozen people. In 2001 a U. S. scientist is accused of using anthrax to contaminate mail.

A US "taster" tested the food being dished up to President Barack Obama at a dinner in a French restaurant, a waiter said on Sunday.

 

According to the calculations of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)  in its new report, Iran will be able to produce one nuclear bomb by the end of 2009, doubling that figure in 2010. sources note that these estimates only apply to uranium enrichment at Natanz. They do not factor in the product of Iran's clandestine enrichment plants.

 

Last week Obama completely skirted stopping Iran's nuclear weapons program which has alarmed, angered and frightened Middle East allies.

 

If Lebanon's March 8 bloc headed by Hizballah wins Lebanon's election Sunday, June 7, as it fully expects, its sponsors in Tehran have big plans for Hizballah's leader, the fiery Hassan Narallah, to become strongman, charged with establishing a second Iran and remodeling Hizballah on the lines of Iran's Revolutionary Guards.

 

The two candidates for prime minister are Parliament Speaker Nabih Beri, leader of the Shiite Amal movement, and Abdullah Miqtay, a very good friend of Syrian president, Bashar Assad, with whom Tehran will share the spoils of defeating the pro-Western bloc led by Saad Hariri and incumbent prime minister Nouri Siniora.

 

Whichever wins to job, the prime minister, government and its ruling mechanisms will all be reduced to rubber stamps for the will of the new national overlord, Hassan Nasrallah, and ultimately Tehran.

 

Their putsch, executed in the guise of a democratic election, will gradually force Lebanon, in all its walks of life - government, army, police, intelligence, education, religion and civil rights - into the molds of their counterparts in the Revolutionary Republic of Iran. In time, the large and vibrant pro-Western Christian community, which gives Lebanon its multi-religious, cosmopolitan character, will emigrate leaving behind a tame satellite of the ferociously radical Iran.

 

The Christian community is alive to the threat. Saturday, June 6, in an effort to rally Christian voters to turn out in force, the Maronite Christian Patriarch Nasrallah Butros Sfeir warned that Lebanon faces a threat to its very existence as an Arab entity.

 

DEBKAfile's Middle East sources dismiss the predictions in Riyadh, Cairo, Washington and Paris that the election will produce a national unity government. They are offering castles in the air to distract attention from their failure to halt the galloping Iranian-Syrian-Hizballah momentum for seizing control of Lebanon.

 

Friday night, June 5, as if on cue officials in Vienna disclosed that Iran was found to have accumulated quantities of low-enriched uranium (1,339 kilos produced since November 2008 plus 839 kilos in stock) - enough to convert into the amount of high-enriched uranium needed for making a single nuclear bomb.

 

More than 7,000 uranium-enriching centrifuges were installed at Natanz, adding an extra 2,000 from February, the agency has found.

 

At this rate, 10,000 centrifuges will be spinning at Natanz with a capacity to enrich enough uranium for 2 Uranium (U-235)  fission bombs by the end of 2010, double the IAEA's modest estimate by its own figures.

 

From January, when Obama took office, Tehran has won a year's grace for developing its nuclear program. Obama said last week Iran is entitled to a peaceful nuclear program which few believe it is up to now. Direct dialogue on which Obama insists will not begin before July. Progress will be evaluated at year's end, a six-month deadline accepted by Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Iran has therefore been granted plenty of time to make hay i.e. make nukes - free of diplomatic or military constraints.

 

The IAEA admits its investigations are stalled both in Iran and Syria, where its inspectors also reported Friday the discovery of new traces of man-made uranium near Damascus.

 

Iranian officials insist their nuclear program is peaceful and refuse to answer questions or cooperate in any way with UN inspectors. At one point in its new report, the IAEA asked for cameras with different wide-range angles for Natanz, indicating that even there, the Iranians are playing cat and mouse to conceal the real scale of their activities from view.

 

Damascus is similarly stonewalling on the international inspectors' inquiries about the new traces of man-made uranium particles. DEBKAfile's military sources note that these particles could come from only two sources:

 

• One is a new enrichment site. This site has reported repeatedly in the past year that Syria had secretly restarted its banned nuclear activities at three concealed locations which were constructed after Israel destroyed its unfinished plutonium reactor on Sept. 6, 2007.
• Alternatively, Syria may be importing enriched uranium smuggled out of Iran, North Korea or Kazakhstan.

 

The prevailing party in Sunday's election promises a more moderate approach but it is unclear whetherthe situation will evolve into a workable coalition or devolve violence.

 

The U. S. Supreme Court has delayed the sale of Chrysler to Italian owned Fiat.

Former U.S. Rep. William Jefferson faces several obstacles to being acquitted of bribery, racketeering and other federal charges - and topping the list is explaining the $90,000 cash stashed in his home freezer.

Jefferson, a Louisiana Democrat who represented parts of New Orleans until losing his bid for re-election last year, goes on trial Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia on allegations that he received more than $400,000 in bribes in return for using his influence to broker business deals in Africa.

Defense attorneys are expected to attack the credibility of a witness who frequently wore a wire for the government. They have to hope a jury will accept a fairly legalistic distinction that Jefferson's conduct wasn't bribery, but was more technically akin to influence peddling. And there's the money in the freezer _ $90,000 wrapped in aluminum foil, found by federal agents in August 2005 in Jefferson's Washington home.

Just days earlier, agents videotaped him at a northern Virginia hotel accepting a suitcase stuffed with $100,000 cash from a cooperating witness.

The freezer funds became such a headline that Robert Trout, Jefferson's lawyer, suggested at a recent hearing that potential jurors need to be reminded during the jury selection phase of the trial that the Jefferson case is the one about "the money in the freezer" to try to weed out jurors exposed to pretrial publicity.

U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III agreed the reminder would be appropriate.

The cooperating witness who gave Jefferson the cash was Lori Mody, a northern Virginia business executive whose complaint to the FBI in March 2005 launched the probe against Jefferson. According to the indictment, Mody was becoming suspicious that Jefferson constantly was demanding cash to facilitate various business deals. She is expected to testify against the former congressman.

Jefferson's lawyers have questioned whether Mody is a reliable witness and whether her memory can be trusted. They have sought records of Mody's mental health history and raised questions about possibly erratic behavior, including Mody's fears that she was being stalked.

Bribery occurs when an officeholder receives something of value in exchange for an "official act." Defense lawyers argue that unless Jefferson took money in exchange for an official duty like voting on a bill or sponsoring legislation, it isn't illegal. It may be immoral influence peddling, they say - but not illegal.

Prosecutors offer a more expansive view: If Jefferson used the influence of his office to benefit constituents, then it falls under the bribery statute.

The trial is expected to last at least a month

President Barack Obama met the King of Saudi Arabia, who kissed Obama twice. Obama says he hasn't got this kind of treatment since he met Keith Olbermann

After trying to mend ties with the Arab world while incensing Israel  and encouraging Iran Obama set his eyes on old enemies and allies in Europe.

His visit to Germany and France on Thursday, Friday and Saturday is aimed at lowering tensions raised because of europe's tepid support for the U. S. in recent years.

Obama flew his wife and two children to Euroipe at a taxpayer cost of $50,000 per hour for a holiday in Paris this weekend..

To lay the groundwork for Obama's foreign policy initiatives, including bids to mend ties with Iran and Russia, a revamped Afghanistan/Pakistan strategy and ambitious measures to fight climate change have gone down well with European leaders. Moreover, Obama is hugely popular with ordinary citizens who have had and have intense anti-Americanism largely based on avarice and jealousy for what they see as a lavish lifestyle and cowboy demeanor replaced now by an appeaser

But, among polioticians and the more thoughtful  Obamania has subsided amid fears of inflation, waffling and a foreign policy of convenience and disarray. But, politically they still want whatever they can filch from Obama.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel may have felt snubbed by Obama recently. Not only did it take weeks for a video conference to be scheduled with the president (such conferences were held regularly with the former president), Merkel also failed in scoring a bilateral with Obama ahead of the Group of 20 summit in London plus she has openly criticized Obama's profligate spending of more specifically borrowing.

Last week the high-ranking German negotiation team tasked with rescuing car maker Opel, a General Motors daughter, was very upset when the U.S. Treasury Department sent only a minor official to the negotiation table.

Even the current trip sparked frustration. Merkel had tried to bring Obama to Berlin, but the president refused.

The chancellor would have liked to clinch a photo-op with Obama ahead of regional and national elections this year in Germany.

Berlin is ripe with speculation as to what the reasons for the refusal may be.

Some say it's due to a lack of personal chemistry; others say it's a private revenge for Merkel's refusal to have Obama speak in front of the Brandenburg Gate, Germany's symbol of the peaceful anti-communist revolution that brought down the Berlin Wall.

But a third reason may be more likely: The German leadership simply isn't that flexible right now.

Obama has tried to get Berlin to send more troops to Afghanistan and to dispatch a portion of them into the volatile southern provinces, where U.S., British and Dutch troops are suffering casualties in firefights with the Taliban.

Obama knows that before September, when Germans go to the polls to elect a new government, not much will happen in Berlin in terms of concrete security cooperation pledges.

That cooperation to fight extremism pays off is one of the central messages Obama will bring to Europe this week.

After arriving in Dresden Thursday, Obama visited the former Buchenwald concentration camp, which was liberated in 1945 by U.S. troops. Charles Payne, Obama's great-uncle, was part of a U.S. infantry division that in April 1945 liberated Ohrdruf, a satellite camp to Buchenwald. Although it appears Obama exaggerated his intimacy with his great uncle.

Obama will finish off his visit to Germany by touring Ramstein Air Base and meeting with U.S. troops wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan at the Landstuhl military hospital. He will then go to France for bilateral talks with President Nicolas Sarkozy and extensive celebrations commemorating the 65th anniversary of the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe in Paris and Normandy.

Sarkozy, nicknamed "L'Americain" by his fellow citizens, courted Obama long before he became president. This has paid off. It seems that at the moment, America's relations with France are trumping those with Germany - a historic first in many decades.

Obama told French television he enjoyed a "wonderful relationship" with Sarkozy, lauding the French president's commitment to stabilizing Afghanistan and his strong stance against Iran's nuclear program and appears bedazzled by Paris.

A day after Osama bin Laden said "Obama is planting the seeds of Muslim hatred for America" Obama spoke at Cairo University before a hand-picked audience of 3,000.  In a self-evident statement Obama said America has never been nor ever will be at war with Islam" which avoids World War I when the Ottoman Empire along side the Kaiser's Germany against the U. S. and allies He said he had ended the use of torture and ordered Guantanamo closed within a year. Prior to travelling to the Middle East Obama peculiarly declared America a major Muslim country.  Which it is not having perhaps a 1.5% Muslim population. Pecularly Obama vehemently denied his Muslim heritage even declaring his father an atheist during last year's election campaign. Both statements that have invited ridicule.

Following Obama's speech White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said "the United State is no longer losing the P. R. war" seemingly acknowledging the speech was in fact a P. R. ploy at least in his mind.

Coincident to Obama's speech Osama bin Laden issued  another audiotape saying, as the Quaran does, it  would be wrong for Muslims to befriend unbelieving infidels -  Christians and Jews. For his part Obama read passages from the Quaran, Talmud and Bible obviously avoided such inflammatory passages referred to by bin Laden.

Shaun Hannity responded on ABC's Good Morning America by asking why Obama did not point out it was the US who liberated Muslims in Kuwaiti, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Somali and other Muslims as well as feeding the starving in Darfur. "It seemed like a political speech to me."

The authoritative Middleeast new source Debkafile issued a statement saying, "Obama stressed the need for mutual respect and tolerance among the world's faiths, denigrated al Qaeda and extremism, said the US "does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements," will respect all elected peaceful governments provided they respect their peoples, and called for universal human and women's rights to be upheld. His much awaited speech to more than a billion Muslims which quoted extensively from the Koran, but also the Bible and the Talmud, won cheers from the hand selected 3,000 strong audience in Cairo University's Great Hall Thursday, June 4.

 Along with a declaration that US bonds with Israel are unbreakable, President Obama demanded that Israel and the Palestinians uphold their obligations to the roadmap. "America will align its policies with those who seek peace - Israelis, Palestinians or Arabs," he declared and promised to personally pursue the goal of peace and security for breaking the Israel-Palestinian stalemate. Palestinians must be allowed to live a normal life in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, he said, but they must abandon violence.

Rockets on sleeping children or bombs killing old people on a bus are intolerable, but the US does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements and Israel must recognize the Palestinian right to the dignity of a state of their own but so must the Arab world recognize Israel.

It should not exploit the Middle East conflict to distract their peoples from their problems. Privately, he said,, many Arabs recognize that Israel will not go away, just as many Israelis recognize the Palestinians right to a state. America will align its policies those who seek peace, Israelis, Palestinians or Arabs. "Jerusalem must be the lasting home for all faiths, all the children of Abraham."

Obama began his speech by saying: "I have come to Cairo to seek a new beginning of mutual respect between America and Muslims: Salaam Aleikum." America and Islam are not mutually exclusive; they share common principles." Muslims have enriched America in many fields.

But no one should tolerate al Qaeda which killed members of all faiths, most of all Muslims, Obama stressed. America went to war to pursue al Qaeda after it ruthlessly murdered more than 3,000 Americans on Sept. 11. The United States is not fighting Islam in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but extremists who violate the Koranic injunction against killing innocents. US troops will be out of Iraq by 2012, he pledged.

 He spoke frankly about the state of democracy, human and women's rights and education, with obvious implications for Muslim nations and governments.

 From Egypt, the US president flies to Europe for two days during which he will visit Dresden and pay his respects at the site of the Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald. From Germany he travels to Normandy to attend D-Day anniversary ceremonies.

 Obama's speech was translated by the White House into 12 languages and released on Twitter and the internet.

I'm learning a lot about "The Tonight Show." " The Tonight Show" first aired in 1954. It was a simpler time, when Americans actually watched NBC.- Obrien

 "We will not stand idly by as North Korea builds the capability to wreak destruction on any target in the region or on us," US defense secretary Robert Gates said in a speech Saturday, May 30, at the annual Asian security conference in Singapore. But he insisted the next step in negating Pyongyang's ambitions would be political, not military and called for stronger sanctions against internationally censured North Korea and Iran.

The first round of Security Council sanctions were ineffectual; Pyongyang conducted its nuclear test Monday May 25 regardless, and is reportedly preparing the test-fire of a second long-range missile in defiance of international condemnation. 

While the US maintains 250,000 military personnel in the region and will continue as a "resident power," the US defense secretary said its role is changing. He told delegates from 20 Asian and European nations to take more effective action jointly and rely less on America. He urged more US-Chinese cooperation. 

North Korea has a million-strong army, with thousands of tanks and artillery pieces close enough to the border to have the South Korean capital of Seoul within range. Despite a sharp technological advantage for the South the weight of such numbers would mean Seoul would fall in the early hours or days of a war. 

In his speech, Ma Xiaotian, deputy chief of general staff of China's People's Liberation Army, said: "We are resolutely opposed to nuclear proliferation. Our view is that the Korean peninsula should move towards denuclearization." The Chinese general added: "Our hope is that all parties concerned will remain cool-headed and take measures to address the problem." 

Clearly, no military response is contemplated for now against North Korea, although Pyongyang has threatened military action against the South after Seoul's decision to join a US-led Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) under which North Korean ships could be stopped and searched. 

As for proliferation, Gates insisted that the "transfer of nuclear weapons or material by North Korea to states or non-state entities would be considered a grave threat to the United States and our allies."

Yet he, like other administration officials, was careful to avoid mentioning North Korea's blatant nuclear and missile transfers to Iran going back years. Therefore it is easy to speculate that as VP Biden said,  Get used to a nuclear armed Iran, and now by implication North Korea.  

DEBKAfile's military sources stress that the overlap between the two extends to their nuclear timetables and posture of defiance in the face of international condemnation. North Korea and Iran match one another step for step, learning for one another's experience and mistakes. 

DEBKAfile's Washington sources affirm that Obama is preparing America and the world to accept the necessity of living with a nuclear-armed North Korea, as the world's ninth nuclear power. 

An unnamed US official said: "This is a whole new ballgame and it's a whole lot deeper and darker and scarier." He added: …It's a bit like when you get out a pair of binoculars and you get it just right. It has brought into crystalline focus what North Korea's intentions are - that they do mean to develop this capability." 

This perception will be hardest of all for North Korea's neighbors, especially South Korea and Japan, to live with. Their response may well be a nuclear race, mirrored by the Middle East's skeptical reaction to the Obama policy of halting Iran's progress toward a nuclear bomb by talk. 

Israel's leader, prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, defense minister Ehud Barak and foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman are taking advantage of the long Shavuoth Festival weekend to withhold comment on the position taking shape in Washington with regard to a North Korea's nuclear attainments and its possible implications for Iran's program. 

DEBKAfile's defense sources affirm that Tehran took note and is encouraged by Obama's  inaction when North Korea launched its long-range Taepodong-2 missile on April 5 even though the Americans knew an underground nuclear test was on the way. Iran will be even more encouraged by Washington's "political" response to the nuclear test itself to go forward with preparations for its own test.

Tomorrow is President Ronald Reagan's birthday (1912-2004).

A USA Today pie chart shows the $546,688 per American family federal debt including: $284,286 for Medicare; $160,126 for Social Security; $54,537 in interest payments; $29,694 for military retirement; $15,851 for civil service retirement, and $2,172 for other costs. Of course this does not count any costs for Obama's profligate spending and not a dime for his proposed nationalized health care plan. Some project a $1,000,000 per household share within 20 years.

Saturday is the anniversary of the 1944 allied invasion of Nazi Europe at Normandy.

As Obama sets off to Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Europe he excoriated Israel and will avoid Israel and had harsh words for the Jewish state as he prepared to leave the U. S. A grimly determined and realistic Israel released an analysis that it could survive a massive Iranian nuclear strike, according to report by a Russian physicist.

The study, based on Israeli and U.S. data, said Israel could survive an attack of as many as 80 atomic bombs. Israeli casualties, the study said, could be significantly reduced through construction of bomb shelters and dispersal of population.

"The atomic bomb does not mean doomsday," Yehoshua Sokol, author of the report, said. "Simple things like bomb shelters and dispersal of the population would help significantly."

The report, presented on May 24 to the MilTech-2009 exhibition and conference, marked the first open study of the repercussions of a nuclear attack on Israel as well as recommendations to reduce casualties.

The report, presented to the Defense Ministry and the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, was assisted by Israeli government engineers and scientists, including from the Soreq Nuclear Research Center, regarded as the Israeli equivalent of the Livermore National Laboratory in the United States.

"If we build a system that stresses the construction of protected rooms [within homes and office buildings] then we could eliminate 75 percent of the casualties," Sokol said. "It's as if we had intercepted 75 percent of the incoming [nuclear] missiles."

Sokol has been a member of the Academic Forum for Nuclear Awareness and a staffer at Falcon Analytics, based in Ashkelon. A Russian-born physicist, Sokol has lectured and presented studies on a range of defense issues, including the utility of laser weapons.

Titled "Nuclear Threat: The New Challenge to Missile Defense Systems," the report examined a nuclear strike on Tel Aviv, Israel's commercial center. The study drafted a scenario of an attack by a 15 kiloton atomic bomb, similar to that dropped by the United States on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945.

One atomic bomb dropped on Tel Aviv would result in 6,000 casualties if residents in the affected area were in protected rooms, the study said. Without protection, 25,000 people were expected to die.

The study said 7,000 people would be killed if an atomic bomb fell on the Israeli city of Ramle, east of Tel Aviv and with less population density. About 1,000 people would be killed in an atom bomb that struck Israeli communities in Western Samaria in the northern West Bank. In both cases, the study envisioned that the population would not be protected.

The worst scenario was of an attack on Israel by 80 atomic bombs. The study envisioned 75,000 casualties with a population protected by bomb shelters, and 300,000 dead should Israel take no precautions.

The Israeli study came in the wake of Iranian warnings that the Jewish state could not survive even one atomic bomb. Several Israeli defense analysts have expressed the sense of futility in trying to defend against an Iranian nuclear strike.

"If the Iranians are not rational [and fire a nuclear missile toward Israel] then we should go home, pack up and get out of here," Reuven Pedatzur, academic director for the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Strategic Dialogue, said.

Sokol, citing survivors from Hiroshima, said the lethality radius from an atomic bomb could be no more than 150 meters. As a result, he said, a nuclear attack on Tel Aviv would probably spare most of its residential and office towers.

"To knock out Aziereli [tallest building in Tel Aviv] or any other big building, you would need a direct or near direct hit by an atomic bomb," Sokol said.

The report, referring to the U.S. atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, played down the prospect of massive casualties from nuclear radiation. Sokol, citing U.S. data, said fewer than 1,000 people died from cancer in the two Japanese cities from 1958 to 1998. About 100,000 people were killed in the combined U.S. nuclear attacks.

As a result, Sokol said, the most likely nuclear scenario was of an electro-magnetic pulse attack on Israel. This would mean the firing of a nuclear weapon that would explode at least 30 kilometers in altitude and knock out the electronic and electrical grid of the Jewish state. The report called on Israel to upgrade its infrastructure.

"Infrastructure could be hardened against an EMP attack at a cost increase of one to five percent if done at the stage of development," the report said.

In a related story Iraq's Kurdistan has sought to downplay reports of a potential military alliance with Israel.

The autonomous Kurdish region in Iraq said it would not allow any foreign operations without permission from Iraq and the United States. Officials said the U.S. military would protect Iraqi air space from any intrusion, including that of Israel. But, the Kurds are urging the US to stay in its territory to help it defend itself.

When you are having a horrendously bad day and think that your problems are insurmountable…..

JUST REMEMBER:

SOMEWHERE OUT THERE, THERE IS A MR. PELOSI.

 Obama has not yet decided whether his historic speech reaching out to Islam will be delivered on June 4 from a lecture hall at Al Azhar University in Cairo or its main mosque. If it is the second, his address will take place in the presence of Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa, the Sunni Muslim world's greatest religious authority. In any event, Al Azhar is the most eminent school of Islamic learning in the world and the US president therefore expects its impact to far outweigh his first address to Muslims from Istanbul.

 His arrival from a meeting with Saudi King Abdullah in Riyadh on June 3 is planned to add extra weight to Obama's dramatic outreach to Islam, since the king officiates as Custodian of the Holy Places to Islam.

Radical Muslims will therefore have all the more reason for rejecting it.

 Giant transports have been landing at Cairo airport, unloading a fleet of armored vehicles, White House helicopters, counter-terror weapons and the vanguard of the 3,000 Secret Service officers backed by CIA and FBI personnel who will secure the US president during his stay in Egypt. Cairo will soon be in turmoil as forces are deployed from a command center at the American Embassy to control sections of downtown Cairo, with guard posts on the Nile River's banks, the international airport, main railway terminals and approaches to the city.

 Some 30,000 Egyptian security personnel including army units stationed in Cairo have been placed on special duty until the American president leaves. Their names and those of the welcoming party at Al Azhar University were submitted to the US presidential security center.

 Obama is due to land in Cairo Thursday at 10 a.m., drive to the Abidin Palace to meet President Hosni Mubarak and proceed from there to Azhar University. His convoy will be escorted by vehicles equipped with sensors for detecting firearms and explosives and covered by Marine helicopters overhead.

Until the last minute, Obama's routes to the university have been withheld from Egyptian security authorities as a safeguard against leaks to hostile elements.

 All of this is playing out against a background of souring relations with Israel bordering on open hostility as Obama continues to withhold military equipment the Jewish state seems critical.

The notorious late-term abortion provider was shot and killed at his church in Wichita, Kan. on Sunday morning. Tiller was shot as he served as an usher during Sunday morning services at Reformation Lutheran Church. Monnat said Tiller's wife, Jeanne, was in the choir at the time of the shooting.

The clinic run by the 67-year-old doctor has repeatedly been the site of protests for about two decades. .A protester shot Tiller in both arms in 1993, and his clinic was bombed in 1985. Capt. Brent Allred said police were looking for a gunman who fled in a 1993 light blue Ford Taurus registered in Merriam.

The Pentagon's semi-secret strategy for countering the rise of a hostile China is contained in a secret defense policy document described publicly by the U.S. Pacific Command leader to reporters last year.

Adm. Timothy Keating, PACOM commander, told reporters the Defense Policy Guidance is the basis for the U.S. buildup of forces in the Pacific.

Asked if the Chinese were monitoring the U.S. buildup, Keating replied: "I kind of hope they do. [Laughter]. We've got a number of B-2s in Guam now. I'm hoping they notice. We're doing our best to make sure they do. We want them to understand that we're going to continue to course around the Pacific in ways apparent and maybe not quite so apparent, but we're going to utilize all the arrows in our quiver, if you will, and B-2s in Guam, continuous bomber presence writ larger in Guam and elsewhere. We've been told to do it by Defense Policy Guidance, and we're most assuredly doing it."

No other details of the Guidance are available. However, a 1992 version of the Defense Policy Guidance stated that U.S. military strategy is to prevent the emergence of a rival superpower. Such emergence "is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power."

Many dismiss the so-called hedge strategy as not being clearly enunciated, since it is counter to the neoliberal posture toward China advanced by Harvard scholar Joseph Nye in the 1970s, which holds that a policy treating China as a threat would become a self-fulfilling prophecy and itself create a threat.

However, that notion is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain, given China's growing military strength and forward leaning strategy. A strategy that has even suggested a partition of the Pacific with the U. S.

North Korea's Krazy Kim (NKKK) complicates things with an policy of nuclear armed unpredictability. Perhaps the most ironic position on NKKK is South Korea's description that it is no yet a nuclear power as if changing a title matters most.

A retired Air Force colonel with decades of experience as a flight instructor gave one of his students a hands-on lesson in a key principle of flying: Don't run out of gas. Al Uhalt of Colorado Springs made a bumpy but safe landing in a field Thursday when the single-engine Aviat Husky he and a student were flying ran out of fuel near the end of a 45-minute lesson.

An Al Qaeda's top dog Abu Omar Al Baghdadi, captured on April 23 and identified as the leader of the Al Qaida-aligned Islamic State of Iraq, said AQI has been the funded from Egypt as well as Iraq's neighbors, including Syria.

"The external sources are from some associations based in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria as well as some people who bring money to Iraq," Al Baghdadi said. "There are also internal sources derived from theft, extortion as well as that stolen from the salaries of employees."

Al Baghdadi provided the information in a video confession released on May 19. The U.S. military, denied access to the detainee, has refused to confirm the identity of Al Baghdadi.

Iraqi officials said Al Baghdadi has identified the groups and individuals that fund AQI. They said much of the information, particularly funding from Syria, has been confirmed by other AQI detainees.

Officials said U.S. Central Command, responsible for U.S. military operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, has determined that a revived Al Qaida poses a threat to the six Gulf Cooperation Council states as well as neighboring Iraq and Yemen. They said Al Qaida, flushed with success in Afghanistan, has sought to expand its presence throughout the Gulf

In the video, Al Baghdadi, not his real name, said he was born in 1969 in Iraq's Diyala province. He said he joined Al Qaida in 2005 and formed the Islamic State of Iraq a year later. The Islamic State of Iraq has denied that Al Baghdadi was captured.

Al Baghdadi, whose real name was not disclosed, said Al Qaida maintained links to the Baath Party and the Iraqi Islamic Party. He claimed responsibility for the bombing of the Shi'ite shrine in Samara in 2006, saying the attack was ordered by the late AQI chief Abu Mussib Al Zarqawi.

Al Qaida and Iraq's Baath Party also coordinate operations, Al Baghdadi said. He said Baath Party operatives loyal to the late President Saddam Hussein have been responsible for the relay of orders and some funding to Al Qaida.

"The relationship is unified, and instructions for the Baath and Al Qaida from abroad arrive together," Al Baghdadi said. "There are people connected to the Baath Party who coordinate this."

Al Baghdadi said the Islamic State of Iraq operates throughout Iraq. He said each region contains a separate leadership.

"The Cabinet is comprised by region," Al Baghdadi said. "Each region has its own ministers, and each minister has his own speciality."

In a related story Egypt's Interior Ministry said Al Qaida has been recruiting and directing operational cells in Egypt. The ministry said the Al Qaida cell targeted Cairo as well as Western tourists and energy facilities

An Ohio man arrested for mowing unkempt grass at a public park said he just wanted to make his city look nice. John Hamilton said he took control of the situation because the grass in Sandusky's Central Park was about a foot high. According to a police report, a witness said Hamilton was blowing grass onto the sidewalk and shredding trash in the park that had not been picked up.

One of the first cases Sotomayor rules on should she be confirmed as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court could be a American Civil Liberties Union 2001 suit demanding that a seven-foot cross erected in the California desert in 1934 commemorating sacrifices endured by our soldiers in World War I be taken down.

In 1934, a gritty prospector named J. Riley Bembry gathered a couple of his fellow World War I veterans at Sunrise Rock. Together they erected a simple wooden  cross  in honor of their fallen comrades. The memorial has been privately maintained ever since….

A wrinkle developed in 1994, when the federal government declared the surrounding area a national preserve. With the cross now located on newly public land, .the ACLU demanded that the National Park Service tear down the cross.

The creation of this World War I monument was part of a 1930s medical program to help World War I veterans recover from "shellshock". Physicians treating them thought that their work in the desert heat would be therapeutic. In 2004 the Ninth U.S. Court of Appeals agreed with the ACLU, but veterans groups objected - thus the case's journey to the U. S. Supreme Court.

Now it would seem to that the cross is a historic monument that need not be subject to contemporary fashions in thought, to wit, the fashion of hunting down religious symbols and eliminating them from government property. The cross simply represents the feelings of soldiers from a bygone era. There are religious symbols on public display from the past elsewhere. For instance, there are religious symbols on the Supreme Court building. carved in the Court's chamber of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments from God. There may even be a picture of God up there. Viewing the 1934 cross today might give curious Americans a sense of what our country was like back in those days before the ACLU was spreading goodwill around the country by harassing people of faith.

Yet that is not the way the battleaxes at the ACLU see it. One of its lawyers, Peter Eliasberg, told the Washington Times, and as reported in American Spectator "For us to choose the principal symbol of one religion that says Jesus is the Son of God and He is divine and say that is an appropriate way to reflect the sacrifice of people who don't believe that is excluding by its very nature." Well, "we" did not choose the symbol. Veterans from what was once called the Great War did, apparently with the consent of their physicians. This is an interesting historic memorial that the ACLU would deny us.

Veterans groups that are opposing the removal of the cross disagree with Eliasberg. Their members argue that the cross represents the "Fallen Soldier Battle Cross." That is a rifle and crossed bayonet that is driven into the ground to honor a fallen comrade. Will the ACLU oppose this too? Jim Sims, of the Military Order of the Purple Heart, told the Times the controversy is "about thousands of veteran memorials and monuments around the country. This is about the issue of honoring veterans."

It is trendy in our noisy public discourse to see "the right" being accused of injecting religion into politics. Actually very often "the right" or more specifically "the Christian right" is merely defending settled manifestations of religion that go back decades in our history, occasionally centuries. As I see it the ACLU would have us rewrite American history, eliminating all references to God, the Bible, and other such artifacts. Of course, for people of faith these artifacts are reminders of faith. So maybe the ACLU could begin a campaign to disallow people of faith from lapsing into prayer in front of such reminders. Possibly the ACLU's next campaign will be to eliminate religious symbols from public buildings, starting with the Supreme Court. As Luigi noticed, some Americanos are too disputatious.

In 2007 the 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals sided with removing the cross saying, "Carving out a tiny parcel of property in the midst of this vast Preserve - like a donut (sic) hole with the cross atop it - will do nothing to minimize the impermissible government endorsement," the opinion said. The 9^th Circuit is the most overturned Appeals panel in US history. One of its justices Eisenberg notoriously said when ask about the repeated rejections of his and the panels decision, "They can't catch everything."

Obama risky policy includes nuclear armed Iran and North Korea, and will spark profliferation and arms race that could destabalize globe.

"We will not stand idly by as North Korea builds the capability to wreak destruction on any target in the region or on us," US defense secretary Robert Gates said in a speech Saturday, May 30, at the annual Asian security conference in Singapore. But he insisted the next step in negating Pyongyang's ambitions would be political, not military and called for stronger sanctions against internationally censured North Korea and Iran.

 he first round of Security Council sanctions were ineffectual; Pyongyang conducted its nuclear test Monday May 25 regardless, and is reportedly preparing the test-fire of a second long-range missile in defiance of international condemnation.

While the US maintains 250,000 military personnel in the region and will continue as a "resident power," the US defense secretary said its role is changing. He told delegates from 20 Asian and European nations to take more effective action jointly and rely less on America. He urged more US-Chinese cooperation.

North Korea has a million-strong army, with thousands of tanks and artillery pieces close enough to the border to have the South Korean capital of Seoul within range. Despite a sharp technological advantage for the South the weight of such numbers would mean Seoul would fall in the early hours or days of a war.

 In his speech, Ma Xiaotian, deputy chief of general staff of China's People's Liberation Army, said: "We are resolutely opposed to nuclear proliferation. Our view is that the Korean peninsula should move towards denuclearization." The Chinese general added: "Our hope is that all parties concerned will remain cool-headed and take measures to address the problem."

Clearly, no military response is contemplated for now against North Korea, although Pyongyang has threatened military action against the South after Seoul's decision to join a US-led Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) under which North Korean ships could be stopped and searched.

As for proliferation, Gates insisted that the "transfer of nuclear weapons or material by North Korea to states or non-state entities would be considered a grave threat to the United States and our allies."

Yet he, like other administration officials, was careful to avoid mentioning North Korea's blatant nuclear and missile transfers to Iran going back years. Therefore it is easy to speculate that as VP Biden said,  Get used to a nuclear armed Iran, and now by implication North Korea.

  DEBKAfile's military sources stress that the overlap between the two extends to their nuclear timetables and posture of defiance in the face of international condemnation. North Korea and Iran match one another step for step, learning for one another's experience and mistakes.

 DEBKAfile's Washington sources affirm that Obama is preparing America and the world to accept the necessity of living with a nuclear-armed North Korea, as the world's ninth nuclear power.

 An unnamed US official said: "This is a whole new ballgame and it's a whole lot deeper and darker and scarier." He added: …It's a bit like when you get out a pair of binoculars and you get it just right. It has brought into crystalline focus what North Korea's intentions are - that they do mean to develop this capability."

 This perception will be hardest of all for North Korea's neighbors, especially South Korea and Japan, to live with. Their response may well be a nuclear race, mirrored by the Middle East's skeptical reaction to the Obama policy of halting Iran's progress toward a nuclear bomb by talk.

Israel's leader, prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, defense minister Ehud Barak and foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman are taking advantage of the long Shavuoth Festival weekend to withhold comment on the position taking shape in Washington with regard to a North Korea's nuclear attainments and its possible implications for Iran's program.

DEBKAfile's defense sources affirm that Tehran took note and is encouraged by Obama's  inaction when North Korea launched its long-range Taepodong-2 missile on April 5 even though the Americans knew an underground nuclear test was on the way. Iran will be even more encouraged by Washington's "political" response to the nuclear test itself to go forward with preparations for its own test.

As the State's fiscal collapse continues California's Senate Rules Committee takes up a flock of gubernatorial appointments, but the only appointees required to appear and answer questions are four nominees for the state parole board. The list of those not required to appear include Bo Derek, best known for her scantily clad role in the movie "10," whom Schwarzenegger has appointed to the state Horse Racing Board. Exactly why California spends money on such commissions can not be explained.

Two illegal aliens, Raphael  Resindez, 23, and Enrico Garza, 26, probably believed they would easily overpower home-alone 11 year old Patricia Harrington after her father had left their two-story home.

It seems the two crooks never learned two things: they were in Montana and Patricia  had been a local clay shooting champion and hunter since she was  nine.

Patricia was in her upstairs room when the two men broke through the front door of the house using a sledge hammer.  She quickly ran to her father's room and grabbed his 12 gauge Mossberg 500 shotgun.

Resindez was the first to get up to the second floor only to be the first to catch a near point blank  blast of 00 buckshot from the 11-year-old's knee crouch aim. He  suffered fatal wounds to his abdomen and genitals.

When Garza ran to the foot of the stairs, he took a blast which  shredded his left shoulder and staggered out into the street and  bled to death before medical help could arrive.

It was  found out later that Resindez was armed with a stolen 45 caliber  handgun he had stolen earlier from another home invasion robbery.  That victim, 50-year-old David Burien, was not so lucky. He died from multiple stab wounds to the chest.

Ever wonder  why stories like this never makes NBC, CBS, PBS, & MSNBC, CNN,  or ABC news……..an 11 year old girl, properly trained, defended  her home and herself……against two murderous, illegal aliens  ……..and she wins, she is still alive.

hecatomb (HEK-uh-toom, -tom) noun: A large-scale slaughter. ETYMOLOGY: Originally a hecatomb was a public sacrifice and feast of 100 oxen or cattle to the gods in ancient Greece and Rome. The word is derived from Latin hekatombe, from Greek hekatombe, from hekaton (hundred) + bous (ox). Another word derived from bous (ox) is boustrophedon. USAGE: "The use of high-tech weapons will result in hecatombs, smart as the US bombs may be."

When the bankrupt San Francisco Chronicle lectures Obama about fiscal fornication you know you're wading around hipdeep in a dung pile. "This year," the Chrincile says, "the government is borrowing 50 cents of every dollar it spends. If that were just a blip caused by a historic financial crisis that necessitated a $787 billion fiscal stimulus and a $700 billion bank rescue in the space of about three months, there would be little cause for concern."

It talks about Obama's borrowing reducing the USA to a "banana republic."

Worse it says is not a blip. It is a relentless curve of red ink that will, within the decade, take U.S. debt levels to the record reached at the end of World War II, from 40 percent of the nation's output now to 80 percent, and then rapidly thereafter into the realm of banana republics.

"We (US taxpayers) owe about half that debt to foreigners, including the Chinese whom are playing the dollar like a commodity and others whose foreign policy is not always well aligned with ours," said Isabel Sawhill, a former Clinton administration budget official who now co-directs the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution. "So we are really losing control of our economic destiny and possibly losing control of our foreign policy as well."

Japan has lost its AAA credit rating, the United Kingdom may soon follow, and there is talk that the United States is headed fast down the same path.

Last week the Treasury Department announced a huge sale of new debt - $162 billion - as part of its financing of the government's $1.8 trillion deficit this year. That's as much as the entire government spent just eight years ago. Within hours, interest rates on U.S. Treasuries shot up.

In recent weeks, the prices of credit default swaps on U.S. government debt - a measure of the risk that the government could do the unthinkable and default - have risen to record levels.

The market reactions highlight a growing disconnect between the Obama ambition including a $1.5 trillion overhaul of the nation's health care system, and the money available to do it. Sunday Obama admitted that "we are running out of money."

As if to underline the point, the Social Security and Medicare trustees, who include three Obama Cabinet officials, issued their report saying the finances of the two bedrock social programs are dire.

"We are heading toward very high debt-to-GDP ratios very soon," said UC Berkeley economist Alan Auerbach. He said the rise in perceived risk of the federal government going bankrupt is sobering.
The United States does not now even meet the standards for admission to the European Union, because its deficit and debt levels are too high. The federal government faces either enormous tax increases or inflation (regressive taxation in another form), to remedy the problem.

The consequence is people, instead of having money to buy a home, have to send it to the government to pay the interest on the debt. "There are no ways around this. This is not academic. It's not theoretical. It's real. The numbers are there.

The appetite for U.S. debt has remained robust, and Treasurys were viewed as a safe haven amid the financial turmoil last fall. The United Kingdom credit warning has turned many eyes suddenly to the United States.

"Nothing happens until it does," says Auerbach. "People were warning about the housing market and the bubble and nobody seemed to worry about that, and now a lot of us are sorry. The United States can go on for several more years doing absolutely nothing responsible to get the debt under control and things may be fine, but at some point, and it's impossible to predict when, people can lose confidence in the U.S. government's ability to deal with its problem, and things can unravel. Whether that happens in five years or 10 or even longer, it's impossible to say."

The idea that something very bad will happen is now a consensus view among budget experts.

"Our creditors are beginning to ask questions, and it's only a matter of time before something bad happens," said Saw-hill. "

Even House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, the top lieutenant to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, said this month, "If a fiscal meltdown comes, there will be no one to bail out America."

So far, there is little indication that Obama is taking the issue seriously, other than talking and talking about which comprises his entire domestic and foreign policy.

Laughably Obama said several days ago in announcing $17 billion in proposed budget savings that "we can no longer afford to leave the hard choices for the next budget, the next administration or the next generation."

But $17 billion is a grain of sand in the roughly $60 trillion in unfunded liabilities the federal government carries.

Obama calls his budget a "new era of responsibility," but it would add $9 trillion to an already unsustainable debt burden over the next decade.

Obama inherited a mess, including the financial crisis. The Bush administration put everything - wars, tax cuts, Medicare prescription drug benefits - on the national credit card instead of paying for them. While Obama talks about changing direction, he has not yet done so. Pundits joke that his cuts include: Fox News, Bill O'Reilly, and Hannity but nothing substantive.

In fact, his plans not only do not fix the problem, they make it worse. The Congressional Budget Office said the Obama budget will cut taxes by $2.1 trillion, most of that by extending most of the Bush tax cuts, and increase spending $1.7 trillion over 10 years, resulting in a net increase in interest costs alone of $1 trillion.

Obama made some hard choices, but most of these have been shunned or are being watered down by Congress, from trimming tax write-offs for charity to raising revenue by limiting greenhouse gas emissions. Congress has already raised the price of the administration's latest supplemental spending bill, adding $6.2 billion for military hardware, including C-17 aircraft that Defense Secretary Robert Gates recommended terminating.

But the larger problem, as in California, is that the public also recoils from spending cuts and tax increases

"It goes back to my days as mayor," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat and former mayor of San Francisco, who noted during an interview in her office Thursday that she is very worried about the situation. "I would go before a group. Do you want more police officers?"

"Yes," was the firm reply.

"Do you want more firefighters?" Yes, again, very firmly.

"Do you want to pay for them?" An emphatic no.

"That's the situation out there," Feinstein said.

Money isn't there

"The requests don't stop coming," Feinstein said. "We've had over 2,000 earmark requests from counties, from cities, up and down the state. Local governments are in trouble, they're looking for money, and everybody comes here, and says, 'Can't you do it?' And there just isn't the money."

The story is a microcosm of what will happen with increasing frequency as Medicare starts squeezing out more and more other spending as the Baby Boom retirement gets seriously under way.

But Pelosi and Obama have said no to taking on Social Security and want to proceed instead with health care reform. They argue that it is Medicare and health care costs generally that are driving U.S. finances over a cliff. The United States spends $2.5 trillion a year on health care, more than any other rich nation, and yet has poorer outcomes. About $700 billion is wasted each year. Health insurance premiums have been rising five times faster than wages for eight years and are bankrupting businesses too.

But there is also widespread skepticism about Obama's claim that spending more on health care now will somehow fix the budget. Savings from such things as computerized health records and preventive care will not begin to cover the cost of expanding care to the uninsured. Nor will higher taxes on the wealthy. In fact no serious, non-drug using economist agrees with Obama.

Obama has been hard-pressed to even find ways to pay for the expansion of health coverage, much less a way to bring down the deficit at the same time," Sawhill said. "If you could slow the trajectory on health care spending it would help, but not much in the next decade. And I'm not sure we have a decade to fix this problem."

Obama tapped federal appeals Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court on Tuesday, officials said, making her the first Hispanic in history picked to wear the robes of an associate justice. A Hispanic  born in Puerto Rico she was the least likely among those nominees discussed, and controversial for her views, comments and demeanor.

If the Senate confirms her, Sotomayor, 54, would succeed retiring Justice David Souter.

Obama made the formal announcement at 10:15 AM EST

Obama had said publicly he wanted a justice who combined intellect and empathy, the ability to understand the troubles of everyday Americans.

If approved, she would join Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as the second woman on the current court.

Sotomayor is a self-described "Newyorkrican" who grew up in a Bronx housing project after her parents moved to New York from Puerto Rico. She has dealt with diabetes since age 8 and lost her father at age 9, growing up under the care of her mother in humble surroundings. As a girl, inspired by the Perry Mason television show, she knew she wanted to be a judge.

A graduate of Princeton University and Yale Law School, a former prosecutor and private attorney, Sotomayor became a federal judge for the Southern District of New York in 1992.

As a judge, she has a bipartisan pedigree. She was first appointed by a Republican, President George H.W. Bush, then named an appeals judge by President Bill Clinton in 1997. Since being on that court her decisions have been overturned five times by the Supreme Court and a very controversial decision involving affirmative action in the New Haven Fire Department is widely expected to be overturned this summer.

In that decision she sided with the city of New Haven, Conn., in a discrimination case that white firefighters brought after the city threw out results of a promotion exam because too few minorities scored high enough.

In one of her most memorable rulings as federal district judge, Sotomayor essentially salvaged baseball in 1995, ruling with players over owners in a labor strike that had led to the cancellation of the World Series.

She is expected to be confirmed after a spirited debate.

Before she left for China, reporters repeatedly questioned House Speaker Nancy Pelosi about her claim that the CIA lied to her, but Pelosi remained tight-lipped . . . she also remained tight-foreheaded and tight-eye-lidded

Overall, 55% of voters say they at least somewhat approve of the President's performance so far while 44% disapprove. The Rasmussen index is the product of the percentages of those who strongly approve or disapprove of Obama's performance. That currently stands at +1%. So far that number has never been negative.

31% of the nation's voters now Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Thirty percent (30%) Strongly Disapprove

Following the President's speech on the Guantanamo prison camp, just 38% agree with the President's decision. Forty-nine percent (49%) now disagree. Opinion was evenly divided in January. By a two-to-one margin, voters oppose having any of the suspected terrorists brought to prisons in the United States. Only 25% share the President's belief that the Guantanamo camp weakened the nation's security.

Patricia Demauro set a new record for the longest craps roll, hanging on for four hours and 18 minutes at the Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa in Atlantic City.after 154 rolls of the dice. She bought in for $100 and the casino won't say how much she won. The odds of doing so are several million to one.

Everything Obama, the Federal Reserve, and Congress are doing was predicted in startling detail almost two decades ago by a famous Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman.

Friedman died  in 2006, in his prophetic book, Friedman showed how, facing massive deficits, the U.S. government would dramatically increase the money supply; why foreign countries would stop buying our debt; how the Fed would start buying our Treasury bills; and why this would call cause massive inflation.

He even predicted that our officials would claim inflation was no problem at all.

Amazingly all of this is coming to pass!

Make no mistake about it - the Obama administration is embracing massive inflationary deficit spending.

In just 100 days, Barrack Obama has more than doubled the U.S. money supply . . . committed the government to at least $7 trillion in new spending . . . and warned the American people to expect trillion-dollar deficits for the foreseeable future.

While the media has been falling over itself to praise Obama's "bold initiatives," the question no one has been asking is, "Where is all of this money coming from?"

Decades ago, Milton Friedman answered these questions clearly and precisely in his insightful - and very topical - book, Money Mischief: Episodes in Monetary History.

In Money Mischief, Friedman even warned that the coming inflation could "destroy" our country.

Here's what he wrote: "Inflation is a disease, a dangerous and sometimes fatal disease that, if not checked in time, can destroy a society." (Money Mischief, Page 191)

You see the end result of that process in countries like Zimbabwe today, where prices double every day, and it now takes a $10 billion Zimbabwe note to buy a single loaf of bread - assuming you can find one.

Could America suffer the same fate? Friedman wrote ominously, "The fate of a country is inseparable from the fate of its currency."  The US Dollar is under attack woirldwide.

Even Warren Buffett recently admitted on CNBC that the only way for the U.S. to solve its woes was to inflate the currency.

There is little doubt that Obama's massive deficit spending will doom the dollar and our economy.

You need to find out what is really happening to our economy and your wealth and get a copy of Milton Friedman's pathbreaking book, Money Mischief.

Its insights are so relevant and shocking - it reads like it was just published for our times!

Friedman also tells how the U.S. and the West could still avoid hyperinflation, even with unbacked paper currency

Looks like Ruth Bader Ginsburg will no longer be the hot chick on the Supreme court.