Iran prepping al-Qaida for large-scale attacks’

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JERUSALEM – In response to any future Israeli military strike on its nuclear sites, Iran has been training al-Qaida elements in the Egyptian Sinai desert on how to coordinate retaliatory attacks, a senior Egyptian security official told WND.

The al-Qaida attacks are meant to target both Israeli and Egyptian installations, the security official said, as part of an Iranian plot to widen any Israeli-Iranian conflict to involve other countries.

The Egyptian official said there is also information Iran has been working with Islamic Salafist groups in Jordan that are allied with al-Qaida.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guards helped to train al-Qaida elements in the Sinai and Gaza Strip to carry out large-scale attacks, including missile attacks, cross-border incursions, suicide bombings and explosions targeting infrastructure, such as oil and gas pipelines, the official said.

Any Iranian cooperation with al-Qaida would underscore the dangers of Tehran obtaining nuclear weapons. The country has a history of using terrorist proxies, most notably Hezbollah in Lebanon, to carry out its bidding.

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Read More at WND By Aaron Klein, WorldNetDaily

Entitlements, Not Tax Cuts, Widen the Wealth Gap

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What should be done about income inequality? That basic question underlies the arguments hashed out in the supercommittee and promises to be a central issue in the presidential campaign.

Supercommittee Democrats argue that income inequality has been increasing and can be at least partially reversed by higher tax rates on high earners. They refused to agree on any deal that didn’t include such tax increases.

Supercommittee Republicans offered a plan to eliminate tax preferences and reduce tax rates, as in the 1986 bipartisan tax reform. They argued that high tax rates would squelch economic growth.

They didn’t make the case that their proposals would also address income inequality. But House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, in a 17-page paper based largely on a Congressional Budget Office analysis of income trends between 1979 and 2007, has done so.

Ryan, a Republican from Wisconsin, makes the point that the government redistributes income not only through taxes but also through transfer payments, including Social Security, Medicare, food stamps and unemployment benefits. The CBO study helpfully measures income, adjusted for inflation, after taxes and after such transfer payments.

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 Read More at Human Events By Michael Barone, Human Events

Video: Police Confront Protestors

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Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks $13 Billion

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The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing.

The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.

Saved by the bailout, bankers lobbied against government regulations, a job made easier by the Fed, which never disclosed the details of the rescue to lawmakers even as Congress doled out more money and debated new rules aimed at preventing the next collapse.

A fresh narrative of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 emerges from 29,000 pages of Fed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and central bank records of more than 21,000 transactions. While Fed officials say that almost all of the loans were repaid and there have been no losses, details suggest taxpayers paid a price beyond dollars as the secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger.

‘Change Their Votes’

“When you see the dollars the banks got, it’s hard to make the case these were successful institutions,” says Sherrod Brown, a Democratic Senator from Ohio who in 2010 introduced an unsuccessful bill to limit bank size. “This is an issue that can unite the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. There are lawmakers in both parties who would change their votes now.”

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 Read More at bloomberg.com By Bob Ivry, Bradley Keuon, and Phil Kuntz, Bloomberg

Senate voting to allow military to imprison US citizens without trial

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[T]he Senate is gearing up for a vote on Monday or Tuesday that goes to the very heart of who we are as Americans. The Senate will be voting on a bill that will direct American military resources not at an enemy shooting at our military in a war zone, but at American citizens and other civilians far from any battlefield — even people in the United States itself.

Senators need to hear from you, on whether you think your front yard is part of a “battlefield” and if any president can send the military anywhere in the world to imprison civilians without charge or trial.

The Senate is going to vote on whether Congress will give this president—and every future president — the power to order the military to pick up and imprison without charge or trial civilians anywhere in the world. Even Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) raised his concerns about the NDAA detention provisions during last [week’s] Republican debate. The power is so broad that even U.S. citizens could be swept up by the military and the military could be used far from any battlefield, even within the United States itself.

The worldwide indefinite detention without charge or trial provision is in S. 1867, the National Defense Authorization Act bill, which will be on the Senate floor on Monday. The bill was drafted in secret by Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) and passed in a closed-door committee meeting, without even a single hearing.

I know it sounds incredible. New powers to use the military worldwide, even within the United States?

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Read more from Chris Anders, Washington Legislative Office, HERE.

President Obama’s Bizarre Support for the Brazilian Economy

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Since taking office in 2009, President Obama has accomplished great things for the economy . . . of Brazil, that is.  For some bizarre reason, Obama continues to do all he can to help out workers and businesses in South America’s largest nation.

We all remember the U.S. Export-Import Bank’s multi-billion dollar loan proposal to Petrobras – a large Brazilian oil firm – to aid in the development of Brazil’s deep sea oil exploration.  And then, in early 2011, President Obama announced a “Strategic Energy Dialogue” with business leaders in Brazil that would, according to the Administration, result in the United States becoming one of the largest consumers of Brazilian energy.

Seeing the American president traveling around the globe, almost begging other nations to ramp up their energy production with billions of US dollars, is not just embarrassing; it’s incomprehensible given the extraordinary, untapped energy reserves available right here at home, especially in my home state of Alaska.

Now the Administration seems to be moving even more US dollars to Brazil.  In a little covered story from a few days ago, it was revealed that the Air Force has turned down the bid from American aircraft manufacturer Hawker Beechcraft to produce a light attack armed reconnaissance aircraft.  Hawker Beechcraft is based in Kansas and employs around 1,400 workers in 20 states.  According to the company, $100 million had been invested over a two year period in working with the Air Force in developing the its AT-6 aircraft.

The winner of the nearly one billion dollar decision to terminate Hawker appears to be the Brazilian aircraft company Embraer and their “Super Tucano” airplane.  It’s odd that the Air Force would prefer US pilots to fly in warzones in planes constructed in Brazil by Brazilian workers.  Stranger yet, the favored company, Embraer, has recently been placed under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for corruption.

In reaction to this apparently crazy deal, Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey keenly observed that, “If Hawker Beechcraft competed for the contract and lost on price and quality, well, that would be the market at work.  However, they’re not being allowed to compete at all for the new purchase, even though they already supply the Air Force and had been allowed to work on the new bid without any notice that they would be excluded, wasting the $100 million, which produced a plane that appears to have met the guidelines for the bid.  The decision to exclude Hawker Beechcraft from the competition seems curious at best.”

Perhaps Congress might want to take a closer look as to why the Administration appears to have favored a Brazilian builder for homeland-security needs over a domestic firm even before the final bid decision.  If there’s a good reason for the decision, let’s hear it.

In any event, it’s time for We the People to demand an end to the one-way transfer of American wealth to foreign nations.  Although internationalists may love the concept of worldwide income equalization, our Founders would have been repulsed by it.

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Obama Pushing Shooters Off Public Lands

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Gun owners who have historically been able to use public lands for target practice would be barred from potentially millions of acres under new rules drafted by the Interior Department, the first major move by the Obama administration to impose limits on firearms.

Officials say the administration is concerned about the potential clash between gun owners and encroaching urban populations who like to use same land for hiking and dog walking.

“It’s not so much a safety issue. It’s a social conflict issue,” said Frank Jenks, a natural resource specialist with Interior’s Bureau of Land Management, which oversees 245 million acres. He adds that urbanites “freak out” when they hear shooting on public lands.

If the draft policy is finally approved, some public access to Bureau lands to hunters would also be limited, potentially reducing areas deer, elk, and bear hunters can use in the West.

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Read more at USNEWS.com HERE.

Too much regulation? Blame the crony capitalists

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Over at Mother Jones, Kevin Drum has a piece where he says, essentially, companies may complain about complex regulations but the truth is that they love them, because they can use complex regulations to their advantage when competing with other businesses. In fact, Drum argues, companies lobby hard to turn simple rules into complex ones:

“Businesses don’t like simple rules, because simple rules are hard to evade. So they lobby endlessly for exemptions both big and small. This is why we end up with tax subsidies for bow-and-arrow makers. It’s why we end up with environmental rules that treat a hundred different industries a hundred different ways. It’s why financial regulators don’t enact simple leverage rules or place firm asset caps on firm size. Those would be hard to get around and might genuinely eat into bank profits. Complex rules, conversely, are the meat and drink of $500-per-hour lawyers and whiz kid engineers. If the rules are complicated enough, smart lawyers can always find ways around them. And American corporations employ lots of smart lawyers.”

Keep this firmly in mind the next time you hear someone from the Chamber of Commerce complaining about how many thousands of pages of regulations they have to comply with.

Drum’s possible over-generalization is nonetheless a sad truth about the way many companies interact with regulators. Yes, companies are trying to get stuff from the government, and this ends up making regulations more complex than they would otherwise be. I would even argue that there are regulations that only exist because companies lobbied for them (the same way Warren Buffet is asking for his taxes to go up).

Obviously, this flies in the face of complaints about complexity and uncertainty brought about by the regulatory regime. But we often forget the other side of this equation. The fact that these companies manage to get what they want from regulators also flies in the face of the notion of independent regulatory agencies. It takes two to tango: Some regulators are more than happy to grant exemptions and special rules to given companies that will benefit from the resulting complexity.

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Read more at National Review Online HERE.

Climategate 2.0: New E-Mails Rock The Global Warming Debate

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A new batch of 5,000 emails among scientists central to the assertion that humans are causing a global warming crisis were anonymously released to the public yesterday, igniting a new firestorm of controversy nearly two years to the day after similar emails ignited the Climategate scandal.

Three themes are emerging from the newly released emails: (1) prominent scientists central to the global warming debate are taking measures to conceal rather than disseminate underlying data and discussions; (2) these scientists view global warming as a political “cause” rather than a balanced scientific inquiry and (3) many of these scientists frankly admit to each other that much of the science is weak and dependent on deliberate manipulation of facts and data.

Regarding scientific transparency, a defining characteristic of science is the open sharing of scientific data, theories and procedures so that independent parties, and especially skeptics of a particular theory or hypothesis, can replicate and validate asserted experiments or observations. Emails between Climategate scientists, however, show a concerted effort to hide rather than disseminate underlying evidence and procedures.

“I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI [Freedom of Information] Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process,”writes Phil Jones, a scientist working with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in a newly released email.

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Read more at Forbes.com HERE.

Joe Miller’s Thanksgiving Message

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Today, most Americans will enjoy the holiday with family and friends, briefly pausing to give thanks to God for the blessings He has bestowed upon us.   Although we are truly thankful for what we have, most of us take food and other basic necessities for granted.  This is no surprise given the fact that few 21st century Americans have gone without such things for long periods of time.  We also tend to take our national stability for granted.  Other than our heroic veterans, our citizens have never suffered the calamity of warfare.  For the most part, Americans have enjoyed unparalleled peace, prosperity and security for the last generation.  We live in the wealthiest, most powerful nation on earth.

During our Founders’ first Thanksgivings, things were a bit different:  the day was a time of serious reflection, in some cases fasting, and thanks for the blessings of harvest that could make the difference between surviving a harsh winter or starvation.  Life was, frankly, brutal.  The average life span was less than half that of today.  Original American settlements had an unbelievably high mortality rate due to disease, starvation, and hostilities.

Out of these extreme sacrifices arose a Republic with bountiful resources, beautiful landscapes, and exceptional people.  Despite some anti-US sentiment abroad, Americans are still seen as the most generous, caring people in the world.  I think this charity is a consequence of our beginnings where Providence carried us through our most difficult times, ultimately supplying extraordinary blessings.

We should never take any of this for granted.  Not only should the lens of Thanksgiving provide us with an opportunity to contemplate our exceptional circumstances vis-à-vis the rest of the world, it should also remind us of the sacrifices made by those who have gone before us.  We should be motivated to do everything we can to preserve the foundational values recognized by our Constitution.  And we must be truly thankful to God for the present peace, freedom, and stability of our land.  Happy Thanksgiving!

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