Charlie Rangel: Tea Partiers are ‘Mean, Racist People’ from ‘Slave-Holding States’

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Photo Credit: Talk Radio News Service / Creative CommonsNew York Democratic Rep. Charlie Rangel casually dismissed those who identify with the Tea Party as “mean, racist people,” compared red states to the Confederacy and wondered why President Barack Obama would ever try to work with Republicans — all in under two minutes.

Rangel made the remarks during an interview Tuesday night with NY1, when the anchor asked the congressman about a recent deadly explosion in his Harlem district. The congressman strangely blamed Republicans for blocking unnamed federal programs designed to refurbish failing infrastructure in his community.

“This is the president’s program,” he claimed. “It’s hard for me to explain how you work with a president that thought he could really deal with the Republican leadership. He really thought — and maybe it’s the water they drink at Harvard — that he could deal with the Tea Party!”

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Russophobia and Islamophilia

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Photo Credit: American Thinker It’s hard to believe that it has been a quarter of a century since Ronald Reagan began to dismantle the ideological wall that divided Europe. Harder still to believe that American politicians, Right and Left, are trying to resuscitate the Cold War — or something hotter. Recent events in the Ukraine seem to be giving the citizens of Europe and America hot flashes of deja-vu.

At the tactical level, US policy has devolved to “regime change.” At the strategic level, US policy is simply incoherent, if not nihilistic; swapping corrupt oligarchs for neo-fascists or religious zealots. The logic for supporting recent coups have little to do with common sense — or democracy. And with Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Egypt, and now the Ukraine, language needs to be coined to avoid words like coup.

By any other name, a coup is still a coup. And using a post-facto election to legitimize a coup is a little like putting a new hat on a dead cat. The Kerry/Obama team is giving subtlety and sovereignty bad names.

When Vladimir Putin, tongue in cheek, says there are no Russian troops in the Ukraine, he mocks John Kerry and Victoria Nuland who orchestrate dissidents in Maidan square, in some cases neo-fascists who did not get their way on the bail-out treaty with the EU.

The auction for the Ukraine is now closed. The price doubled overnight, from 16 to 35 billion dollars and counting. Politicians break it, now the taxpayer gets to pay for it. Kerry is now offering to buy the next Ukrainian election too.

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Rand Paul Slams Surveillance State: ‘Drunk With Power’

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Photo Credit: Win McNamee/Getty ImagesBy Shane Goldmacher.

Sen. Rand Paul delivered a blistering critique of America’s spy agencies on Wednesday, likening the surveillance state to the “dystopian nightmares” of literature and arguing that a growing number of his colleagues on Capitol Hill now fear an intelligence apparatus that is “drunk with power.”

“If you have a cellphone, you are under surveillance,” Paul warned an auditorium of more than 350 at the University of California at Berkeley, adding, “I believe what you do on your cellphone is none of their damned business.”

He demanded stronger oversight, calling for a new, bipartisan select committee to monitor the nation’s intelligence agencies. “It should watch the watchers,” he said.

Paul said the National Security Agency and Central Intelligence Agency have run amok. The intelligence world, he said, had wrongly interpreted that “equal protection means Americans should be spied upon equally.”

“I oppose this abuse of power with every ounce of energy I have,” Paul declared.

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Photo Credit: Aric Crabb/Bay Area News GroupRand Paul, Republican presidential hopeful, finds support in Berkeley, of all places

By Josh Richman.

Nobody should be surprised that Rand Paul got so warm a welcome Wednesday, even in a city whose name is often preceded in conversation by “The People’s Republic of…”

After all, the junior U.S. Senator from Kentucky and likely contender for 2016’s Republican presidential nomination is following in his father’s footsteps by drawing crowds of enthusiastic young followers, particularly on college campuses, wherever he goes.

And his policies — particularly criticizing government surveillance programs, avoiding military actions that aren’t vital to national security, and rethinking the war on drugs — draw voters from across the spectrum, including some of Berkeley’s famed lefties.

“He’s a serious contender,” said Bruce Cain, a political expert who directs Stanford University’s Bill Lane Center for the American West. “He can come to the Bay Area and plausibly look for money, which is not the case with Sarah Palin or some of the other people on the right.”

The younger Paul has found that money at a series of local fundraisers Tuesday and Wednesday, and tapped his young activist base with a speech Wednesday afternoon at UC-Berkeley’s International House.

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CNN: Flight 370 Swallowed by ‘Black Hole’?

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Photo Credit: CNN ScreengrabBy Josh Feldman.

CNN’s Don Lemon has been entertaining all sorts of theories about the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, including the chance something “supernatural” happened, but on Wednesday night, he actually asked panelists about the possibility a black hole was involved.

Lemon brought this up along with other “conspiracy theories” people have been floating on Twitter, including people noting the eerie parallels to Lost and The Twilight Zone, and wondered, “is it preposterous” to consider a black hole as a possibility?

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Top U.S. General: Look For Missing Jet In Pakistan

By WND.

Retired Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney — the recipient of the Distinguished Flying Cross, Bronze Star, Air Medal with 17 oak-leaf clusters, Distinguished Service Medal and other honors — is suggesting searchers looking for the missing Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 take a look at possible landing spots in Taliban-controlled Pakistan.

In an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News, McInerney, now a contributor to the network, said his recommendation was based on information from sources he was unwilling to disclose on television as well as the analysis of an intelligence service called LIGNET.

McInerney said the free world needs to be worried until the location of the jet, which disappeared March 8 on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, is determined.

“My concern is if this airplane could be used as a bearer of a weapon of mass destruction or even conventional munitions that could attack a carrier, Israel, our allies,” he said. “We have to be very alert until we know exactly where this airplane is.”

Investigators believe the airplane changed course shortly after takeoff and headed West for as long as seven hours. They are looking into the politics of the pilot, who had a Boeing 777 simulator set up in his own home from which data recently had been deleted.

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Powers: Bad News for Democrats – Millennials Not As Predictable As They Thought

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Photo Credit: Chip Somodevilla, Getty ImagesBad news for Democrats: It seems Millennials are special little snowflakes after all.

A new report by the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way highlights the political complexity of a generation raised to believe they were utterly unique. When it comes to politics, they do it their way. Which could make the cohort that turned out en masse for President Obama unpredictable as voters.

Third Way focused on how Millennials’ experience as the first generation raised in an information-on-demand culture has shaped them. They are not “adaptors.” They have only known a world full of endless choices, not a life where you make do with what is available.

Third Way reported, “Living in an à la carte world with unlimited options, Millennials don’t feel they have to choose between two limited choices.” For their elders, it was Coke or Pepsi. But Millennials create their perfectly flavored soft drink with a Soda Stream. They design their own shoes on the Internet. They buy just the songs they like.

This creates expectations for politics. Millennials are “less likely to be satisfied with two static choices, and more apt to be swayed to change their tune,” says the report. They “are much more likely to switch the party they support from election to election — even amongst those who claim to ‘lean’ towards one party or another.”

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Financial World Rattled by String of Suicides

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Photo Credit: Shutterstock; Linkedin; Zumapress.comThe financial world has been rattled by a rash of apparent suicides, with some of the best and brightest among the finance workers who have taken their lives since the start of the year.

A majority of the eight suicides of 2014 have been very public demonstrations, which has suicide-prevention experts puzzled.

“Jumping is much less common as a method for suicide in general, so I am struck by the number that have occurred in recent months in this industry,” said Dr. Christine Moutier, chief medical officer of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

Moutier also discounts the location of the act as being the driver behind the reason for the suicide.

“The suicide-research literature doesn’t help very much with the question of why the method of these suicides is so out in the open,” she added.

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Disasters Cost More Than Ever — But Not Because of Climate Change

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Photo Credit: NICOLAS ASFOURI / AFP / GETTY IMAGESIn the 1980s, the average annual cost of natural disasters worldwide was $50 billion. In 2012, Superstorm Sandy met that mark in two days. As it tore through New York and New Jersey on its journey up the east coast, Sandy became the second-most expensive hurricane in American history, causing in a few hours what just a generation ago would have been a year’s worth of disaster damage.

Sandy’s huge price tag fit a trend: Natural disasters are costing more and more money. See the graph below, which shows the global tally of disaster expenses for the past 24 years. It’s courtesy of Munich Re, one of the world’s largest reinsurance companies, which maintains a widely used global loss data set. (All costs are adjusted for inflation.)

In the last two decades, natural disaster costs worldwide went from about $100 billion per year to almost twice that amount. That’s a huge problem, right? Indicative of more frequent disasters punishing communities worldwide? Perhaps the effects of climate change? Those are the questions that Congress, the World Bank and, of course, the media are asking. But all those questions have the same answer: no.

When you read that the cost of disasters is increasing, it’s tempting to think that it must be because more storms are happening. They’re not. All the apocalyptic “climate porn” in your Facebook feed is solely a function of perception. In reality, the numbers reflect more damage from catastrophes because the world is getting wealthier. We’re seeing ever-larger losses simply because we have more to lose — when an earthquake or flood occurs, more stuff gets damaged. And no matter what President Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron say, recent costly disasters are not part of a trend driven by climate change. The data available so far strongly shows they’re just evidence of human vulnerability in the face of periodic extremes.

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Principal Fired Over ‘Speak English’…

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Photo Credit: Mark Stevens / Creative Commons The Hempstead school board won’t renew the contract of a principal who instructed her students not to speak Spanish, in a rapidly-evolving district where more than half of the students, like many Texas schools, are now Hispanic.

Hempstead Middle School Principal Amy Lacey was placed on paid administrative leave in December after reportedly announcing, via intercom, that students were not to speak Spanish on the school’s campus. The Hispanic population of the rural area, roughly 50 miles northwest of Houston, is growing quickly, and Latino advocates say that it’s important to allow Spanish in public schools.

“When you start banning aspects of ethnicity or cultural identity,” says Augustin Pinedo, director of the League of United Latin American Citizens Region 18, “it sends the message that the child is not wanted: ‘We don’t want your color. We don’t want your kind.’ They then tend to drop out early.”

Such fast growth is pervasive in Texas, says Steve Murdock, a professor at Rice University and director of the Hobby Center for the Study of Texas. Half of all Texas public-school students are now Hispanic, he notes. “When you look at issues related to education in Texas, to a great extent, you’re looking at the education of Hispanic children.”

Similar growth patterns, he says, hold true for the rest of the United States: “It’s not just Texas.”

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Watchdog Raises Concerns US Money Paying Afghan ‘Ghost Workers’

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Photo Credit: APA watchdog is raising concerns that some of the money the U.S. is spending to pay the salaries of police officers in Afghanistan may be going to non-existent “ghost workers.”

John F. Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan Reconstruction, wrote in a letter last month to U.S. military officials in Afghanistan that the possibility of “ghost workers” was raised several times during his most recent trip to the country, and during discussions with European Union officials.

Sopko said he wants to get to the bottom of the rumors, and noted he has been encouraged by discussions with officials in Afghanistan to address the concerns.

However, Sopko said more action must be taken to determine how exactly American money is flowing through the Afghan banking system and into the salaries of their police force.

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Insufficient Pipelines Hiked Natural Gas Price

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesNew England’s electric grid operator says a lack of pipelines is driving the price up for natural gas, and hiked wholesale electricity prices in the region by 55 percent last year.

ISO-New England said Tuesday that the average price of wholesale electric energy rose to $56.06 per megawatt hour, up from a historic low of $36.09 in 2012.

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