The godfather of soul, it turns out, was a Ronald Reagan fan.
In a 1984 interview with Rocci Fisch for ABC News Radio, the late James Brown called the then-president ”a man of conviction” and “the most intelligent, most well-coordinated president we’ve ever had.”
The interview, recently animated and re-released by Blank on Blank, a multimedia non-profit organization run by PBS, contains more than five minutes of Brown spewing fragments of wit and wisdom, as well as Fisch’s memories of meeting the R&B legend while he had his hair styled in Washington D.C. before a tribute concert.
Calling himself neither Republican nor Democrat but rather “A man…a humanitarian,” Brown responded with immediate praise when asked, “What do you think of Reagan?”
China Is Reaping Biggest Benefits of Iraq Oil Boom
By Tim Arango and Clifford Krauss. Since the American-led invasion of 2003, Iraq has become one of the world’s top oil producers, and China is now its biggest customer.
China already buys nearly half the oil that Iraq produces, nearly 1.5 million barrels a day, and is angling for an even bigger share, bidding for a stake now owned by Exxon Mobil in one of Iraq’s largest oil fields.
“The Chinese are the biggest beneficiary of this post-Saddam oil boom in Iraq,” said Denise Natali, a Middle East expert at the National Defense University in Washington. “They need energy, and they want to get into the market.”
Before the invasion, Iraq’s oil industry was sputtering, largely walled off from world markets by international sanctions against the government of Saddam Hussein, so his overthrow always carried the promise of renewed access to the country’s immense reserves. Chinese state-owned companies seized the opportunity, pouring more than $2 billion a year and hundreds of workers into Iraq, and just as important, showing a willingness to play by the new Iraqi government’s rules and to accept lower profits to win contracts.
“We lost out,” said Michael Makovsky, a former Defense Department official in the Bush administration who worked on Iraq oil policy. “The Chinese had nothing to do with the war, but from an economic standpoint they are benefiting from it, and our Fifth Fleet and air forces are helping to assure their supply.” Read more from this story HERE.
By Didi Kirsten Tatlow. When China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Hong Lei, told the United States late on Saturday that it should “correctly treat China’s development,” what did he mean?
The reprimand came after the U.S. State Department on Friday called on China to “fully account for those killed, detained or missing in the 1989 bloody military crackdown on protesters in Tiananmen Square,” The Associated Press reported. Mr. Hong also told the U.S. to “discard” its “political prejudice” toward China.
China often emphasizes that it seeks peaceful development. But the authors Heriberto Araújo and Juan Pablo Cardenal believe there is more to it.
In an opinion piece in The New York Times, they write that the state capitalist model behind China’s increasingly successful global push threatens the values of the established democracies. Read more from this story HERE.
By Courtney Coren. Donald Trump tore into President Barack Obama’s administration Monday for allowing China access to Iraqi oil while, he claimed, the United States gets “nothing” after it lost 4,500 troops in the war there.
“I’m not knocking China; I’m knocking our leadership,” the real estate millionaire said on Fox and Friends. “How can they allow this to happen? Read more from this story HERE.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-06-04 01:07:212013-06-04 01:07:21US Military Freed, Protects Iraqi Oil Fields for … the Communist Chinese (+video)
The Wall Street Journal editorial board took a strong stance Monday in favor of the Senate immigration bill, arguing that “immigrants will be crucial” to saving Social Security. The proof: a projection that immigrants will contribute $4.6 trillion (in today’s dollars) towards the Social Security trust fund over the next 75 years–nearly half the $9.6 trillion shortfall (for some reason, the Journal cites last year’s $8.6 trillion estimate.)
Even if true, that does not dispose of Social Security’s problems–and it may be misleading to consider the effects on Social Security alone, when new immigrants will also be making use of a host of other entitlement programs, including Medicare, Medicaid, and now Obamacare.
That is not an argument against immigration, but reminds us that using immigrants to shore up failing welfare state programs may be a recipe for failure.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-06-04 01:04:442013-06-04 01:04:44The Wall Street Journal Spins for the Senate Immigration Bill
President Obama made a secret deal to support Hillary Clinton when she runs for president in 2016, campaign sources say, payback for the support her husband gave him in 2012.
Bill Clinton’s animosity toward Obama is legendary. A year before the last election, he was urging Hillary to challenge the sitting president for the nomination — a move she rejected.
According to two people who attended that meeting in Chappaqua, Bill Clinton then went on a rant against Obama.
“I’ve heard more from Bush, asking for my advice, than I’ve heard from Obama,” my sources quoted Clinton as saying. “I have no relationship with the president — none whatsoever. Obama doesn’t know how to be president. He doesn’t know how the world works. He’s incompetent. He’s an amateur!”
For his part, Obama wasn’t interested in Bill Clinton upstaging him during the presidential campaign. He resisted giving him any role at the convention. Read more from this story HERE.
Bill Clinton’s Half-Million Dollar Speech is Drawing Outrage in Israel
By Sharona Schwartz. Senior Israeli media figures are voicing outrage at a revelation this weekend that former U.S. President Bill Clinton received $500,000 for a gala speech later this month in honor of Israeli President Shimon Peres’s 90th birthday.
The commissioned speech at the Peres Academic Center in Rehovot is expected to last 45 minutes, meaning each minute is costing sponsors $11,111.
According to Israeli news accounts, the large sum will go to the William J. Clinton Foundation which focuses its efforts on a range of causes including economic, health, leadership and environmental.
The Jewish National Fund paid the half-million dollar fee to secure the former president’s participation a year in advance, according to Yedioth Ahronoth.
The Jewish National Fund is known for its tree planting campaigns, park planning and nature reserve construction, which includes encouraging Jews around the world to buy a tree in Israel. As TheBlaze reported last year, it has also been the focus of pro-Palestinian activists who accuse the organization of “war crimes” for its environmentally-friendly activities in Israel which the activists consider to be on Palestinian land. Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: Getty Images
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-06-03 00:02:252013-06-03 00:02:25Bill Clinton: “Obama Doesn’t Know How to Be President…He’s Incompetent. He’s an Amateur!”
The IRS spent close to $50 million on 225 conferences between 2010 and 2012, according to briefings given to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration.
TIGTA will release an audit Tuesday that details surplus spending at a conference in 2010 for 2,700 people in the IRS Small Business/Self-Employed division.
At a House oversight committee hearing on the issue next week, lawmakers will focus on the August 2010 conference held in Anaheim, California, at a cost of $4 million. Several IRS employees stayed in presidential suites at hotels, the committee learned. Such suites currently cost between $1,500 to $3,500 per night.
“The culture of the federal workforce is one where I don’t think you can underestimate that if you don’t keep reminding the voters – but also the federal workers – that we’re watching, this will happen again,” Rep. Darrell Issa said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-06-02 23:58:522013-06-02 23:58:52IRS Spent Millions on Conferences, Employees Stayed in $3500 per Night Hotel Suites (+video)
What Sequester? Washington Booms as a New Gilded Age Takes Root
By Elizabeth Williamson. On a bright spring morning, Debbie Driesman and her interior decorator surveyed progress on Norton Manor, the 40,000 square-foot house she’s building with her husband, information-technology entrepreneur Frank Islam. To make way for the French chateau-style manse, the family bought two houses on adjacent 4-acre lots and invited the local fire department to destroy them. For practice.
The manor, in suburban Washington, features a reflecting pool (just as the Capitol does), east and west wings (like the White House) and is configured for easy Secret Service coverage when VIP guests attend the couple’s Democratic Party fundraisers. Decorator Skip Sroka scoured the globe for Norton Manor’s marble fireplaces, hand-loomed carpets and several tons of gilded and Venetian chandeliers. The gardens are modeled, in part, after those of Henry VIII’s Hampton Court palace.
“If there’s something he can’t have that he wants, you have to find a way,” Ms. Driesman says of her exacting husband. “You can’t just tell him ‘no.’ ”
The sprawling compound is a product of Washington’s Gilded Age—a time of lush business profits initially fueled by government outsourcing and war. Some demographers predicted the boom here would ebb as federal spending shrank amid troop withdrawals from the Middle East and efforts to trim the deficit.
Instead, the region has shown surprising resilience, thanks to an economy that has steadily broadened beyond the government. More than a generation of heavy federal spending, it turns out, has provided the seed money for a Washington economy that now operates globally—less tied to the vicissitudes of the capital’s political rhythms. Read more from this story HERE.
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Wealth of most Americans down 55% since recession
By Constantine Von Hoffman. Increasing housing prices and the stock market’s posting all-time highs haven’t helped the plight most Americans. The average U.S. household has recovered only 45 percent of the wealth they lost during the recession, according to a report released yesterday from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
This finding is a very different picture than one painted in a report earlier this year by the Fed that calculated Americans as a whole had regained 91 percent of their losses. The writers of the report released yesterday point out that the earlier number is based on aggregate household-net-worth data. However, this isn’t adjusted for inflation, population growth or the nature of the wealth. Further, they say much of recovery in net worth is because of the stock market, which means most of the improvement has been a boon only to wealthy families.
“Clearly, the 91 percent recovery of wealth losses portrayed by the aggregate nominal measure paints a different picture than the 45 percent recovery of wealth losses indicated by the average inflation-adjusted household measure,” the report said. “Considering the uneven recovery of wealth across households, a conclusion that the financial damage of the crisis and recession largely has been repaired is not justified,” the researchers said.
Household wealth plunged $16 trillion from the top of the real estate bubble in the third quarter of 2007 to the bottom of the bust in the first quarter of 2009. By the last three months of 2012, American households as a group had regained $14.7 trillion.
The report says almost two-thirds of the increase in aggregate household wealth is due to rising stock prices. This has disproportionately benefited the richest households: About 80 percent of stocks are held by the wealthiest 10 percent of the population. Read more from this story HERE.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-06-02 23:53:562013-06-02 23:53:56As Average Americans Lose 55% of their Wealth, the DC-Connected Enter the Gilded Age
Yusef al-Qaradawi, who is based in Qatar and has been a leading voice supporting the Arab Spring, warned that Iranian Shia were trying to “eat” Sunni Muslims, who are a majority in the Muslim world.
He referred to Alawites, the followers of the Muslim sect to which President Bashar al-Assad of Syria belongs, as being “worse infidels than Christians or Jews”. He also used the deliberately contemptuous term “Nusayris” when talking about them.
He was particularly critical of the roles played by Iran, which is largely Shia, and the Lebanon Shia militia Hizbollah whose name translates as Party of God but which he called “Party of Satan”, in supporting the Assad regime.
“There is no common ground between the two sides because the Iranians, especially conservatives, want to eat the Sunni people,” he said.
The Syrian opposition is dominated, like Syria itself, by Sunni Muslims, but also includes a number of Christians, Alawites and other minorities.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-06-02 23:51:252013-06-02 23:51:25Terrorist vs. Terrorist Rhetoric Continues in Syria: This Time, Iranians “Want to Eat Sunni People”
Congressman says Russians believe Boston bombings were preventable
BY Fox News. Russian intelligence officials believe that if U.S. authorities had acted on warnings about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bombings could have been prevented, U.S. Rep. William Keating said Saturday after returning from a congressional delegation trip to Russia.
The Massachusetts Democrat, who met with Russian intelligence officials Thursday, said he was provided with details on how U.S. intelligence agents were warned in 2010 that Tsarnaev was preparing to join a terrorist cell in the southern Russian region of Dagestan, the Boston Globe reported.
Keating told reporters at Boston’s Logan International Airport that a top Russian counterintelligence official told the delegation that “if we had the level of information sharing that we do now, then the bombings might have been avoided,” according to the report.
He said he learned that information was sent from Russian officials to the U.S. government about Ibragim Todashev, a friend of Tsarnaev who was killed by an FBI agent in Florida on May 22 while being questioned in the bombing probe, the Boston Globe reported. Read more from this story HERE.
Keating says Russian officials were forthcoming on bombing suspect
By Wesley Lowery. FBI agents in Boston have yet to provide information about why Tamerlan Tsarnaev was able to move freely in and out of the country after US officials were warned about him, or about the May 22 fatal shooting of one of his friends in Orlando, Representative William R. Keating said on Saturday after returning from a trip to Russia to meet with that country’s top intelligence officials.
Keating said officials with the Russian Federal Security Service provided details about how they warned US intelligence agents in 2010 that they believed Tsarnaev was preparing to join a terrorist cell in Dagestan, in southern Russia.
After investigating him, FBI officials closed the file on Tsarnaev, who then spent six months in Russia, during which he is believed to have met with known terrorists.
Addressing reporters at Logan International Airport, Keating said he was impressed with what he saw as the forthcoming nature of the Russian intelligence officials. Meanwhile, he said, FBI officials were absent from Capitol Hill hearings about the bombings.
“We had a hearing on homeland security and [the Boston FBI office] were invited,” Keating said. When asked whether agents from the office had shown up, he responded: “No.” Read more from this story HERE.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-06-02 23:50:582013-06-02 23:50:58Congressman: Marathon Bombing Preventable with Russian Intel; FBI Fails to Answer Questions About That and Todashev Killing
Interviews with an IRS field agent involved in the agency targeting Tea Party groups for additional vetting appear to contradict the White House assertion that rogue agents, not the administration, were behind the effort, according to partial transcripts released Sunday by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
The agent in the Cincinnati office, in which the targeting took place, told congressional investigators that he or she was told in March 2010 by a supervisor to search for Tea Party groups applying for tax-exempt status and that “Washington, D.C., wanted some cases”…
When asked by congressional investigators about allegations and press reports about two agents in Cincinnati essentially being responsible for the targeting, the agent responded: “It’s impossible. As an agent we are controlled by many, many people. We have to submit many, many reports. So the chance of two agents being rogue and doing things like that could never happen. … They were basically throwing us underneath the bus.”
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-06-02 23:41:272013-06-02 23:41:27IRS Field Agent: Orders to Investigate Tea Party Came from DC; They’re “Throwing Us Underneath the Bus” (+video)
By Laurie Garrett. The head of the World Health Organization warned the world this week of a new virus, awkwardly dubbed MERS-CoV, found in Saudi Arabia.
“Looking at the overall global situation, my greatest concern right now is the novel coronavirus,” Margaret Chan said, calling it “a threat to the entire world.”
“We understand too little about this virus when viewed against the magnitude of its potential threat,” the director general said in her closing speech to the 66th session of the World Health Assembly. “Any new disease that is emerging faster than our understanding is never under control.
“These are alarm bells and we must respond. The novel coronavirus is not a problem that any single affected country can keep to itself or manage all by itself.” Read more from this story HERE.
UPDATE: MERS Virus Hits Death Toll Of 33 As New Cases Continue To Plague Middle East
By Samantha Olson. A 21-year-old man from Saudi Arabia has died this week after being placed in intensive care for the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), which has brought the worldwide death toll up to 33, according to the World Health Organization.
Three new laboratory-confirmed cases of MERS were announced this week. The Saudi Ministry released a statement, which announced the young man’s death and the two other cases located in Saudi Arabia’s eastern governorate of Al-Ahsa.
All 58 cases of MERS across the globe since September 2012 have been linked to the Middle East and a majority of the disease cases have come from Al-Ahsa. The Saudi Arabia ministry announced the new cases and death only a day after saying it had made progress in its efforts to fight MERS outbreaks.
Researchers from Saudi Arabia and the UK have fully mapped out the genetic series from four infected cases of the MERS virus, according to the health ministry’s statement. Read more from this story HERE.
2 more cases reported in Italy, total in Europe rises to 11
By WHO/Europe. The Ministry of Health in Italy, through the European Union’s Early Warning Response System, has notified WHO of 2 more laboratory-confirmed cases with Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) in the country.
Both the patients are close contacts of the recent laboratory-confirmed case of a 45-year-old man who had travelled to Jordan. The first patient is a two-year-old girl and the second patient is a 42-year-old woman. All three cases are in stable condition.
The man had returned to Italy on 25 May 2013 with symptoms of cough and fatigue. His condition deteriorated and he was hospitalised on 28 May 2013. Laboratory test was conducted by the influenza reference laboratory of Tuscany and confirmed by the National Center of NHI (Istituto Superiore di sanità). Read more from this story HERE.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-06-02 23:40:302013-06-02 23:40:30Why MERS Virus is Terrifying Scientists Throughout the World
President Obama made a secret deal to support Hillary Clinton when she runs for president in 2016, campaign sources say, payback for the support her husband gave him in 2012.
