Detroit Finally Runs Out of Other People’s Money

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Photo Credit: Irish Central Bob Beckel, one of the lefties in the Fox News stable of political pundits, has slowly and grudgingly evolved to accept a harsh reality-Utopian, liberal, social engineering doesn’t always work.

Shockingly on the popular Fox news show “The Five,” Beckel admitted that well intentioned social welfare programs instigated during the 60’s, have created generations of dependent welfare families. The head of household is big daddy government; the real fathers are nowhere to be found.

Welcome to reality Mr. Beckel, you are a perfect example of how long it takes for sunshine to penetrate concrete. In your case is it too soon old and too late smart?

Beckel has been intertwined in shaping left wing social welfare policy using terms such as “social justice” during a long career as a political consultant. He was even the campaign chairman of the failed 1984 Walter Mondale presidential run.

When liberals like Beckel start to see the light at the end of their tunnel, they are just scraping the surface and aren’t quite realizing that light is a speeding train heading their way, fueled on bloated runaway government programs…from social welfare to corporate welfare and every entitlement program in between.

But let’s not expect overnight miracles out of folks who have invested their entire life in a failed ideology. Beckels admission is an important step in his path to his/our recovery; we must measure in terms of progress, not expect perfection.

So it was no surprise as Detroit announced it was filing for bankruptcy, Bob Beckels knee jerk reaction, was a call for the federal government to bail them out of their 18 billion dollar debt. Detroit has been spending 100 million more per year than it takes in. Beckel and people like him default to the bail out in order to avoid the inevitable crash of socialism vs. economic reality…..

Perhaps this hits too close to home for him, since Detroit is the epitome of union control, one party rule that fosters corruption…. and the bottomless pit of every social welfare program dreamed up by utopians in Washington DC, since the 1960’s.

Even Joe Biden was uncharacteristically tongue tied and not able to give a coherent answer when asked about Detroit’s announced bankruptcy; he momentarily had the deer caught in the headlights look as cameras focused in on him….Because this flies in the face of every finger pointing speech he lectured us about how the Obama administrations policies work.

Unfortunately, the failed economic model that Detroit represents is not unique to American cities and states AND our out of control federal government.

Their day of reckoning will come as bondholders refuse to finance debt that just covers operating expenses of bloated/corrupt and inefficient governments. These same governments maintain untenable union contracts with benefits…..Many cities/states pay one active workforce and three retired workforces with lifetime benefits not dreamed of in the private sector.

As Margaret Thatcher once said “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”

That harsh reality comes when investors no longer want to buy your debt at artificially low interest rates and then problems get compounded when investors don’t want to buy your debt, no matter what the interest rate.

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Ed Farnan is the conservative columnist at IrishCentral, where he has been writing on the need for energy independence, strong self defense, secure borders, 2nd amendment, smaller government and many other issues. His articles appear in many publications throughout the USA and world. He has been a guest on Fox News and a regular guest on radio stations in the US and Europe.

Scalia: Judicial Activism a Cause of the Holocaust

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Photo Credit: The Higgs BosonU.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia used the twin terrors of Nazi Germany and radical Islam to warn a Snowmass Village audience Saturday about the dangers of judicial activism.

Speaking to a gathering of the Utah State Bar Association at the Westin Resort in Snowmass Village, the longest-serving justice on the nation’s highest court lamented a trend among federal judges, including his colleagues on the Supreme Court, to read and interpret the U.S. Constitution as a “living document” that changes over time…

When judges begin to reinterpret founding documents like the Constitution and make value-laden decisions about individual rights and liberties, Scalia said, they distort the workings of a democratic society. The title of Scalia’s talk, “Mullahs of the West: Judges as Moral Arbiters,” underscores his point that societal decisions about morality and human rights — most of which have no right or wrong answers — should be made in the political arena and not by the courts…

Scalia cited numerous issues that have been thrown to the courts — a woman’s right to an abortion, society’s right to execute someone for a crime, whether “homosexual sodomy” ought to be allowed — and claimed that judges are unqualified to answer them. Medical doctors, engineers, ethicists and even “Joe Six Pack” would be just as qualified as a legal professional to settle some issues that have come before the high court…

Scalia opened his talk with a reference to the Holocaust, which happened to occur in a society that was, at the time, “the most advanced country in the world.” One of the many mistakes that Germany made in the 1930s was that judges began to interpret the law in ways that reflected “the spirit of the age.” When judges accept this sort of moral authority, as Scalia claims they’re doing now in the U.S., they get themselves and society into trouble.

Read more from this story HERE.

Newly-Retired CENTCOM General Asks Why Iran was Allowed to Get Away With Assassination Attempt on US Soil (+video)

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Photo Credit: YouTubeThe U.S. made a serious mistake by not responding more assertively to an alleged Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States in a bomb attack on a popular Washington restaurant, just-retired CENTCOM commander James Mattis said Saturday.

At an October 2011 press conference Attorney General Eric Holder and FBI Director Robert Mueller announced that Iran’s government had attempted to use a Mexican drug cartel to arrange the killing of the Saudi official, Adel Al-Jubeir, while dining at Cafe Milano in Georgetown. An Iranian-American living in Texas, Manssor Arbabsiar, and Iranian al-Quds force offifical Gholam Shakuri were charged with conspiring to carry out the bombing—which the U.S. officials said was headed off with the help of an undercover Drug Enforcement Agency informant.

“When we finally caught them in the act of trying to kill Adel, we had a beleaguered attorney general, a fine man but beleaguered politically, stand up and give a legal argument that frankly I couldn’t understand,” Mattis said at the Aspen Security Forum. “We caught them in the act and yet we let them walk free.”

Without being specific, Mattis suggested Iran should have suffered some more serious consequence for being behind the alleged plot.

“Frankly, I‘m not sure why, again, they haven’t been held to account,” he said. “They have been basically not held to account….I don’t know why the attempt on Adel wasn’t dealt with more strongly.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Jesse Ventura Lawsuit vs. Murdered Navy SEAL Can Move Forward, Judge Says (+video)

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Photo Credit: Fox NewsJesse Ventura’s lawsuit against “American Sniper” author Chris Kyle — purportedly the deadliest-ever American servicemen — can proceed with the war hero’s widow as a substitute defendant, a judge has ruled.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Arthur Boylan reportedly wrote in his decision concerning Ventura’s defamation suit, “(if) a party dies and the claim is not extinguished, the court may order substitution of the proper party.”

Boylan subsequently named Taya Kyle, executor of her husband’s estate, as replacement defendant, the StarTribune of Minneapolis reports.

Ventura, whose resume includes noted turns as Minnesota governor, WWF wrestler, Navy SEAL, and Hollywood actor, sued Kyle over an unflattering anecdote the sniper slipped into his 2012 book.

Specifically, Kyle alleged that during a 2006 tete-a-tete, the duo duked it out at a California bar after Ventura badmouthed the second Iraq War, the United States, in general, as well as then-President George W. Bush.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Deploying Drones Around U.S.

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Photo Credit: WNDBy Steve Peacock. The deployment of federal drones in and around U.S. shores represents one of the Obama administration’s next steps in the nation’s expanded use of unmanned aircraft systems for surveillance purposes.

The Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, or ONMS, recently acquired Puma UAS – a type of drone that the U.S. Navy also uses – for operations off the coast of Los Angeles.

ONMS now is enlisting contractor support in expanding UAS use in California, Hawaii, Florida, and Washington state. Vendors experienced in working with law enforcement and military personnel are needed for this endeavor, according to a solicitation that WND located through routine database research.

The Puma drones – which are small enough to launch by hand – will be used by ONMS to enforce federal regulations, the document says.

The ONMS drone project will focus on Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary located northwest of LA. However, the contractor also will assist Puma UAS operations at Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument Midway in Hawaii, Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, and Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary in Washington. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: LA TimesJudge torn over lawsuit in drone strike that killed Americans

By Michael Doyle. Courts cannot second-guess drone strikes that kill U.S. citizens overseas, an Obama administration lawyer argued Friday.

A Republican-appointed judge sounded dubious about the expansive claim, saying she was “really troubled” by assertions that courts are completely shut out of the drone strike debate. But for other legal reasons, the judge also sounded hesitant about a lawsuit targeted at top military and intelligence officials for violating the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens blown up in foreign lands.

“There are instances where wrongs are done, but for one reason or another they cannot be remedied in a civil suit,” U.S. District Court Judge Rosemary M. Collyer said.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights, representing a family member, have sued former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and other former officials over the two separate drone strikes that killed three U.S. citizens in Yemen. The Obama administration wants the lawsuit dismissed.

The lawsuit is the latest challenge to the administration’s secretive war-fighting practices that have mobilized skeptics on both the right and the left. ERad more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: U.S. Air ForceU.S. military drone surveillance is expanding to hot spots beyond declared combat zones

By Craig Whitlock. The steel-gray U.S. Air Force Predator drone plunged from the sky, shattering on mountainous terrain near the Iraq-Turkey border. For Kurdish guerrillas hiding nearby, it was an unexpected gift from the propaganda gods.

Fighters from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, filmed the charred wreckage on Sept. 18 and posted a video on YouTube. A narrator bragged unconvincingly that the group had shot down the drone. But for anyone who might doubt that the flying robot was really American, the video zoomed in on mangled parts stamped in English and bearing the label of the manufacturer, San Diego-based General Atomics.

For a brief moment, the crash drew back the curtain on Operation Nomad Shadow, a secretive U.S. military surveillance program. Since November 2011, the U.S. Air Force has been flying unarmed drones from Incirlik Air Base in Turkey in an attempt to suppress a long-simmering regional conflict. The camera-equipped Predators hover above the rugged border with Iraq and beam high-resolution imagery to the Turkish armed forces, helping them pursue PKK rebels as they slip back and forth across the mountains.

As the Obama administration dials back the number of drone attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, the U.S. military is shifting its huge fleet of unmanned aircraft to other hot spots around the world. This next phase of drone warfare is focused more on spying than killing and will extend the Pentagon’s robust surveillance networks far beyond traditional, declared combat zones.

Over the past decade, the Pentagon has amassed more than 400 Predators, Reapers, Hunters, Gray Eagles and other high-altitude drones that have revolutionized counterterrorism operations. Some of the unmanned aircraft will return home with U.S. troops when they leave Afghanistan. But many of the drones will redeploy to fresh frontiers, where they will spy on a melange of armed groups, drug runners, pirates and other targets that worry U.S. officials. Read more from this story HERE.

Food Stamp Recipients are Shipping Welfare-Funded Groceries to Relatives Overseas

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Photo Credit: J.C. RiceFood stamps are paying for trans-Atlantic takeout — with New Yorkers using taxpayer-funded benefits to ship food to relatives in Jamaica, Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Welfare recipients are buying groceries with their Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards and packing them in giant barrels for the trip overseas, The Post found.

The practice is so common that hundreds of 45- to 55-gallon cardboard and plastic barrels line the walls of supermarkets in almost every Caribbean corner of the city.

The feds say the moveable feasts go against the intent of the $86 billion welfare program for impoverished Americans.

A spokeswoman for the US Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service said welfare benefits are reserved for households that buy and prepare food together. She said states should intervene if people are caught shipping nonperishables abroad.

Read more from this story HERE.

Secret Obama Plan Forfeits Temple Mount to Palestinians

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Photo Credit: WNDBy Aaron Klein. The Obama administration has quietly presented a plan in which the Palestinian Authority and Jordan will receive sovereignty over the Temple Mount while Israel will retain the land below the Western Wall, according to a senior PA negotiator speaking to WND.

The Temple Mount is the holiest site in Judaism.

The proposed plan is part of the basis for U.S.-brokered talks that are set to resume in Washington next week after Secretary of State John Kerry announced that both Israel and PA President Mahmoud Abbas have agreed to open negotiations aimed at creating a Palestinian state.

Israel has not agreed to the U.S. plan over the Temple Mount, with details still open for discussion, stated the PA negotiator.

The negotiator, who is one of the main Palestinian figures leading the Arab side of the talks, further divulged Kerry’s proposed outline for a Palestinian state as presented orally to Israel and the PA. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: Uriel Sinai/APIsraeli-Palestinian peace talks’ resumption put in doubt by both sides

By Harriet Sherwood. Moves towards a resumption of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks were mired in rumours, rebuttals, criticism and confusion on Sunday in an indication of the political and diplomatic swamp facing key negotiators and their mediator, the US secretary of state, John Kerry.

In a high-profile dismissal of the embryonic process, Israel’s former foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, wrote on Facebook that there was “no solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, at least not in the coming years, and what’s possible and important to do is conflict-management”.

Naftali Bennett, economics minister, insisted construction on Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem would continue, regardless of talks.

The comments by two crucial partners in the Israeli coalition are a sign of deep hostility within the government over the agreement for preliminary talks forged by Kerry on Friday.

Meanwhile, a veteran Palestinian negotiator, Yasser Abed Rabbo, denied that a firm decision had been taken to enter talks, saying further clarification was needed on a framework and the Palestinians were still discussing terms with Kerry. According to a Palestinian source, Kerry had written a letter giving a US assurance that the basis of territorial talks would be the pre-1967 border, but it was not clear whether the letter had been delivered. Read more from this story HERE.

Obama’s Arab Spring Continues: Now the Kurds Fighting Al Qaeda-linked Rebels in Syria, Receiving Fire from the Turks, Too

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Photo Credit: ReutersIslamist-Kurdish fighting spreads in rebel-held Syria

By Erika Solomon. The local commander of a Syrian rebel group affiliated to al Qaeda was freed on Sunday after being held by Kurdish forces in a power struggle between rival organizations fighting President Bashar al-Assad, activists said…

Sporadic fighting over the past five days in towns near the frontier with Turkey has pitted Islamists trying to cement their control of rebel zones against Kurds trying to assert their autonomy in mostly Kurdish areas…

To the north, activists reported Turkish troops reinforcing their side of the frontier near Tel Abyad, but the army could not be reached for comment. Turkish forces exchanged fire with Syrian Kurdish fighters in another border region earlier in the week…

The ethnic Kurdish minority has been alternately battling both Assad’s forces and the Islamist-dominated rebels. Kurds argue they support the revolt but rebels accuse them of making deals with the government in order to ensure their security and autonomy during the conflict.

The Kurdish people, scattered over the territories of Iran, Turkey, Iraq and Syria, are often described as the world’s largest ethnic community without a state of their own. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: BBC/GettySyria’s Assad is stronger now, says David Cameron

By Nicholas Watt. David Cameron has admitted that the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, has strengthened his position in recent months, and warned that the country faces a “depressing trajectory”.

In an interview on the Andrew Marr Show on BBC1, the prime minister gave his clearest indication to date that Britain will not be supplying arms to the Syrian rebels despite pressing for the lifting of the EU arms embargo.

Cameron insisted he was still committed to helping the Syrian opposition, but admitted its numbers included “a lot of bad guys”. He also acknowledged that Assad had strengthened his position.

The prime minister said: “I think he may be stronger than he was a few months ago, but I’d still describe the situation as a stalemate. And yes, you do have problems with part of the opposition that is extreme, that we should have nothing to do with.”

But Cameron said it would be wrong to abandon the opposition, although he indicated Britain would provide only non-lethal equipment. Read more from this story HERE.

Defense Secretary Hagel to DoD: Furloughs to Last Through At Least Next Year, Will Likely Get Worse

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Photo Credit: APThe audience gasped in surprise and gave a few low whistles as Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel delivered the news that furloughs, which have forced a 20 percent pay cut on most of the military’s civilian workforce, probably will continue next year, and it might get worse.

“Those are the facts of life,” Hagel told about 300 Defense Department employees, most of them middle-aged civilians, last week at an Air Force reception hall on a military base in Charleston.

Future layoffs also are possible for the department’s civilian workforce of more than 800,000 employees, Hagel said, if Congress fails to stem the cuts in the next budget year, which starts Oct. 1.

On the heels of the department’s first furlough day, and in three days of visits with members of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps, Hagel played the unenviable role of messenger to a frustrated and fearful workforce coping with the inevitability of a spending squeeze at the end of more than a decade of constant and costly war.

The fiscal crunch also lays bare the politically unpopular, if perhaps necessary, need to bring runaway military costs in line with most of the rest of the American public that has struggled economically for years.

Read more from this story HERE.

Potential Primary Challenger to McConnell Courting Conservative Groups

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Photo Credit: APKentucky investment executive Matt Bevin has met with some of the nation’s top conservative groups ahead of an expected GOP primary challenge to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, sources told POLITICO.

Bevin, a partner in the Louisville-based hedge fund Waycross Partners, has not publicly confirmed that he will run against McConnell. But an entity dubbed “Matt Bevin for Senate” has reserved airtime in multiple Kentucky TV markets starting this week, and spokespeople for Bevin and McConnell traded on-record barbs last Friday.

In the run-up to his anticipated campaign, Bevin has spoken with leaders of at least three national right-leaning advocacy groups: the widely feared Club for Growth, the Jim DeMint-founded Senate Conservatives Fund and the Madison Project, a small-government group chaired by former Kansas Rep. Jim Ryun.

Those organizations aren’t yet commenting on Bevin, given that he hasn’t declared his campaign.

While the all-but-announced McConnell challenger is believed to be wealthy enough to commit some personal resources to the race, it’s not clear whether he can – or will – fully self-fund a campaign. A key test of his viability may be whether conservative outside groups are willing to give him back-up on the airwaves.

Read more from this story HERE.