Happy New Year?

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The beginning of a new year is often a time to look forward and look back. The way the future looks, I prefer to look back — and depend on my advanced age to spare me from having to deal with too much of the future.

If there are any awards to be given to anyone for what they did in 2012, one of those rewards should be for prophecy, if only because prophecies that turn out to be right are so rare.

With that in mind, my choice for the prediction of the year award goes to Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal for his column of January 24, 2012 titled: “The GOP Deserves to Lose.”

Despite reciting a litany of reasons why President Obama deserved to be booted out of the White House, Stephens said, “Let’s just say right now what voters will be saying in November, once Barack Obama has been re-elected: Republicans deserve to lose.”

To me, the Republican establishment is the 8th wonder of the world. How they can keep repeating the same mistakes for decades on end is beyond my ability to explain.

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Nuclear Option Destroys the Senate

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During the contentious Cold War era, the United States and the former Soviet Union operated on a theory of Mutually Assured Destruction. The Soviets were deterred from launching a first strike against the U.S., the thinking went, because they knew that the response would be immediate and devastating. We are facing a similar situation today in the United States Senate.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D.-Nev.) is threatening to launch a first strike against the core of the Senate’s standing rules – the filibuster.

If Reid fires that first shot, I promise to respond with my own rules change ideas that will expand the rights of all Senators to participate in the legislative process.

The Senate has long been a body that respects the rights of each individual Senator by allowing them to participate fully in extended debate and a free amendment process, regardless of whether they were in the majority or the minority.

Over the past few years, Senator Reid has used his power as Majority Leader to suffocate those two important traditions. He has routinely taken actions to prevent rank-and-file members of the Senate from offering amendments to legislation; now, he is promising to attack the right of Senators to engage in extended debate by pushing a version of so-called “filibuster reform.”

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Video: Egyptian Democracy Activist Says ‘President Obama Needs to Stop Supporting the Muslim Brotherhood’

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Egyptian democracy activist Michael Meunier says President Barack Obama needs to stand up to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

Meunier, a Coptic Christian, is head of the Al Haya Party in Egypt and leader of the U.S. Copts Association. After spending many years studying and working in the United States, Meunier returned to Egypt in 2007 and ultimately participated in the Tahrir Square protests that brought down the regime of Hosni Mubarak in 2011.

On Dec. 19, in between round one and two of voting on Egypt’s recently passed constitution, Meunier visited The Daily Caller to discuss what he sees going on in the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Egypt.

“What we have now is a fascist, Islamist regime that has no respect human rights, no respect for international opinion. Mubarak at least respected international opinion,” he said. “Under Mubarak there was a lot of corruption, but there was no religious fascism … [There was a] difficult life for Christians in Egypt as well, but there was law and order.”

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New Year Diets Destined to Fail: Women Describing Themselves as ‘Fat’, ‘Heavy’ or ‘Chubby’ are Doomed Before They Begin

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The latest research has revealed that women are literally talking themselves fat with eight in ten women saying they believed a positive attitude was the key to losing weight but over half using self critical words when starting a diet.

The research revealed over two thirds of women use the word ‘fat’ to describe an area of their body although six in ten say it makes them feel more negative about themselves than more positive words such as ‘curvy’.

It seems many women also start off with a mindset destined for failure with only a third of women actually starting a diet believing they will lose weight and three quarters having daily negative thoughts about their body. However, over two thirds of women said when they have successfully lost weight in the past they recalled having a positive attitude and ‘talked themselves up’.

Self help author and life coach Janet Thomson, who specialises in weight loss, said: ‘When women are looking to lose weight they want to change something about themselves and of course are more likely to use words such as “fat” for this reason. ‘However what they don’t realise is this sort of negativity can become a self-fulfilling prophecy so it is important to channel positive feelings about themselves and their goals when trying to lose weight as it gives them a much better chance of success.’

According to the research, four in ten said they also talked more negatively about their body when they were with friends with a quarter admitting these open ‘flaw exposing’ coffee shop conversations bring them down. However four in ten women said they felt more motivated if a friend had lost weight or had a more positive attitude to their body.

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Iran Test-Fires Missiles Near Strait of Hormuz

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TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iran’s navy said Monday it test-fired a range of weapons during ongoing maneuvers near the Strait of Hormuz, the passageway for one-fifth of the world’s oil supply.

IRNA quoted Adm. Amir Rastgari, spokesman for the exercise, as saying the Iranian-made air defense system Raad, or Thunder, was among the weapons tested, along with various torpedoes and underwater and surface-to-surface rockets as well as anti-ship missiles. The Islamic Republic said it also deployed domestically-made hovercraft during the operation.

The Raad system was on show during a military parade in Tehran in September for the first time. Iran says is more advanced than its Russian predecessor and is designed to confront fighter jets, cruise missiles, smart bombs, helicopters and drones. Iran said the system fires missiles with a range of 50 kilometers (30 miles), capable of hitting targets at 22,000 meters (75,000 feet).

Tehran has tried to build a self-sufficient military program since 1992. It frequently announces technological breakthroughs, most of which cannot be confirmed independently.

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Georgetown Law Professor: US Constitution ‘Archaic, Idiosyncratic and Downright Evil’

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With hours to go before nation heads off the fiscal cliff, Georgetown Law professor Louis Michael Seidman writes that the time has come to scrap the Constitution.

In an op-ed published in the New York Times Monday, Seidman, a constitutional law professor, claimed that the nation’s foundational document is the real impediment to progress and solutions to America’s troubles.

“As the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government is broken,” Seidman wrote. “But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions.”

According to Seidman, the country’s insistence that it maintain the will of a centuries-old document “has saddled us with a dysfunctional political system, kept us from debating the merits of divisive issues and inflamed our public.”

Seidman, author of the forthcoming book “On Constitutional Disobedience,” explained that adherence to constitutional law, which he has taught for over 40 years, is just “bizarre.”

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Egypt Cements Ties with Hezbollah

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WASHINGTON – Reports from Beirut suggest Egypt will seek to increase ties with the Iranian-backed Hezbollah, Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin documents.

According to Egyptian ambassador to Lebanon, Ashraf Hamdy, the new Muslim Brotherhood-backed Egyptian government intends to build “tight” relations with the resistance group, which the United States, Israel and Canada regard as a terrorist organization.

Hamdy said the Egyptian government was “stretching out its hand” to its neighbors to further its influence in the region.

“You cannot discuss politics in Lebanon without having a relationship with Hezbollah,” Hamdy said. “It is a real force on the ground. It has a big political and military influence in Lebanon.”

This change in policy stands in stark contrast to the severe strain in relations between Hezbollah and the Egyptian government under ousted President Hosni Mubarak.

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Senate Approves ‘Fiscal Cliff’ Deal; House Meets New Year’s Day

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The White House and congressional lawmakers have reached a deal to avoid the “fiscal cliff” that would delay harsh spending cuts by two months, Obama administration officials said on Monday.

The plan was hammered out by Vice President Joe Biden and Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

The Senate overwhelmingly approved the deal, 89 to 8, in a vote just before 2am ET on New Year’s Day. The House of Representatives is expected to vote or take up the deal when it meets on New Year’s Day.

So, technically, the U.S. went over the cliff when midnight struck and some $600 billion of tax hikes and spending cuts kicked in but a deal could be approved by the full Congress in the next few days.

The agreement, which includes both spending cuts and revenue increases, extends tax cuts on incomes up to $400,000 for individuals and $450,000 for couples. Those earning above that would be taxed at a rate of 39.6 percent, up from 35 percent.

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Video: Occupiers Arrested With Weapons, Bomb Making Materials

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photo credit: getdarwin

NY Post: The privileged daughter of a prominent city doctor, and her boyfriend — a Harvard grad and Occupy Wall Street activist — have been busted for allegedly having a cache of weapons and a bombmaking explosive in their Greenwich Village apartment.

Morgan Gliedman — who is nine-months pregnant — and her baby daddy, Aaron Greene, 31, also had instructions on making bombs, including a stack of papers with a cover sheet titled, “The Terrorist Encyclopedia,’’ sources told The Post yesterday. People who know Greene say his political views are “extreme,” the sources said. Morgan Gliedman, daughter of Realtor Susyn Schops Gliedman and prominent doctor Paul Gliedman, was busted at this building with her OWS boyfriend. Cops found the stash in the couple’s West Ninth Street home Saturday when they went there to look for Gliedman, 27, who was wanted for alleged credit-card theft.

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Report: Wind Generation Costs Twice As Much As Government Estimates

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As lawmakers rush to hash out a deal to extend tax credits for wind energy generation, a new report shows that, once hidden costs are accounted for, the true cost of wind power generation is twice that of what previous government estimates have shown.

“Once these hidden costs are included and subsidies are excluded, wind generation is not close to being competitive with conventional generation sources such as natural gas, coal or nuclear,” said George Taylor, lead author of the report and senior fellow in energy policy at American Tradition Institute, in a statement.The Energy Information Administration reported in its most recent “levelized cost of electricity” that wind generation costs eight cents per kilowatt hour. However, this understates the true cost of wind generation because it leaves out indirect and infrastructure costs which are hard to measure and raise the true cost of generating wind power.

For example, wind generation costs three times as much as natural gas-fired electricity and up to 50 percent more than government estimates for new nuclear and coal power generation.

The Energy Information Administration reported in its most recent “levelized cost of electricity” that wind generation costs eight cents per kilowatt hour. However, this understates the true cost of wind generation because it leaves out indirect and infrastructure costs which are hard to measure and raise the true cost of generating wind power.

Most electricity cost estimates fail to take into account, the cost of keeping fossil fuel power plants online to balance out the variations in wind power generation, and the increased fuel consumption — per unit of output — which wind requires of power plants. Estimates also typically don’t include the additional long-distance transmission costs required by wind, as well as the electricity losses associated with it.

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