Iran’s Ahmadinejad Seeks Strategic Axis With Egypt

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Photo Credit: Reuters/Amr Abdallah Dalsh(Reuters) – President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on the first visit to Cairo by an Iranian leader in more than three decades, called for a strategic alliance with Egypt and said he had offered the cash-strapped Arab state a loan, but drew a cool response.

Ahmadinejad said outside forces were trying to prevent a rapprochement between the Middle East’s two most populous nations, at odds since Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution and Egypt’s signing of a peace treaty with Israel in the same year.

“We must all understand that the only option is to set up this alliance because it is in the interests of the Egyptian and Iranian peoples and other nations of the region,” the official MENA news agency quoted him in remarks to Egyptian journalists published on Wednesday.

The two countries have not restored diplomatic ties since Egypt overthrew its long term leader Hosni Mubarak in 2011, but its first Islamist president, Mohamed Mursi, gave Ahmadinejad a red-carpet welcome on Tuesday to a summit of Islamic nations.

“There are those striving to prevent these two great countries from coming together despite the fact that the region’s problems require this meeting, especially the Palestinian question,” Ahmadinejad said.

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CBO: Interest On Debt Snowballing

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Photo Credit: PoliticoBehind the fine print of new budget estimates released Tuesday is a growing — some say brutal — competition between discretionary spending by Congress and fixed interest payments owed on the growing government debt.

Indeed, the steady increase in annual interest costs is a surprisingly big reason why the Congressional Budget Office sees deficits rising in the second half of the coming decade.

Accumulated interest payments from 2014 through 2018 are $1.76 trillion under CBO’s new baseline. Interest payments for the second five years are more than double that or about $3.64 trillion.

The growth takes place in a period when CBO is forecasting a steady ratcheting down on annual appropriations in hopes of reducing future deficits. On top of cuts enacted in 2011, the new baseline assumes that a new round of across-the-board cuts scheduled for March 1 will go into effect.

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The Republicans’ Primary Problem

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photo credit: gage skidmoreHaving just lost an election, many Republicans are anxious to remake our party in the image of Democrats. The theory seems to be that whatever we’re doing isn’t working, so we better change everything.

But in fact, whatever Republicans did in 2012 — other than an overly long primary fight — worked amazingly well, given the circumstances.

In a detailed analysis of the 2012 election, William A. Galston, a fellow with the liberal Brookings Institution, makes a number of fascinating observations that Republicans would do well to consider before embracing amnesty, abortion, gay marriage and Beyonce.

In my analysis of his analysis, the single most important factor in the election was simply that Obama was an incumbent. As Galston notes, beating an incumbent president is a feat that has happened only five times since the turn of the last century. Republicans have done it only once.

On closer examination, in all these cases the incumbent president faced a primary challenge. In three of the five, the incumbent also had a third-party challenger in the general election.

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Study: Opinions on Climate Change Rise and Fall With the Temperature

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Photo Credit: US NewsAmericans’ opinions on climate change blow with the wind—with more concern shown in years that are much warmer or much colder than normal—according to a new study released Tuesday.

Five of the nation’s top newspapers were also more likely to publish opinion pieces that showed “belief” in climate change during years that were colder or warmer than normal. Previous studies have suggested that people are more likely to believe in or “show worry” about global warming when the weather is particularly bad, but the study, published in the journal Climatic Change, is the largest to date and uses data from 1990 to 2010, a much longer time period than previous studies.

“I’m not surprised by the results judging by how pervasive these opinions were in the polls,” says study author Simon Donner, of the University of British Columbia’s department of geography. “I think certainly on a public understanding of science issue it’s a problem. Even if the planet is warming, we’re going to have cold years.”

Donner says that newspapers were more likely to publish opinion pieces about climate change during heat waves in an attempt to make the connection between day-to-day weather and climate. Climate change is not a “breaking story,” according to Donner.

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Video: Hannity, Malkin, and Williams Discuss Obama’s Broken Promises

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Michelle Malkin and Juan Williams joined Sean Hannity on the Hannity Show last night to discuss the discrepancy between Obama’s promises regarding the place of lobbyists in his administration, transparency, healthcare, deficits, tax hikes, and more.

Malkin predictably pummels the president for being duplicitous, while Williams insists we have to give the administration more time.

Hannity highlighted the very different standard applied by the media to George Bush. Clearly the Bush rule don’t apply to this president.

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Virginia Advances Bill Pushing For State To Establish Its Own Currency (+video)

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Virginia is one step closer to breaking ties with the country’s monetary system.

A proposal to study whether the state should adopt its own currency is gaining traction in the state legislature from a number of lawmakers as well as conservative economists. The state House voted 65-32 earlier this week to approve the measure, and it will now go to the Senate.

While it’s unlikely that Virginia will be printing its own money any time soon, the move sheds light on the growing distrust surrounding the nation’s central bank. Four other states are considering similar proposals. In 2011, Utah passed a law that recognizes gold and silver coins issued by the federal government as tender and requires a study on adopting other forms of legal currency.

Virginia Republican Del. Robert Marshall told FoxNews.com Tuesday that his bill calls for creation of a 10-member commission that would determine the “need, means and schedule for establishing a metallic-based monetary unit.” Essentially, he wants to spend $20,000 on a study that could call for the state to return to a gold standard.

The gold standard is a system under which a country ties the value of its currency to gold, setting a fixed price at which gold can be bought or sold by the government.

“We’re not going to be printing money with Dave Matthews or Jeff Davis on the front of it,” Marshall said, referring to two famous Virginians.

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Rove’s Plan To Shape GOP Primaries Turns Into Personal Fight

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Photo Credit: Spencer PlattKarl Rove’s plan to prevent people he views as “lousy candidates” from winning Republican primaries has taken a turn for the personal. This morning, a spokesman for Rove’s Conservative Victory Project labeled the Media Research Center’s Brent Bozell “a hater” in response to Bozell’s description of Rove’s allies as “fake conservatives.”

“Bozell is a hater and he also has a long, sordid history hating Karl Rove too,” Conservative Victory Project (CVP) spokesman Jonathan Collegio, who previously worked for Crossroads GPS, said this morning on WMAL. “He has weird, personal axes to grind.”

Bozell had criticized CVP as an attempt by moderate Republicans to stamp out Tea Party conservatives. “We don’t need a second Democrat Party in Washington,” he said in a statement this week. “These fake conservatives need to go away before they do more damage.” He also noted that “if we had listened to them, there would be no Pat Toomey, no Marco Rubio, no Mike Lee, no Rand Paul, and no Ted Cruz in the Senate today.”

Earlier in the WMAL interview, Collegio explained that “what we can’t do is push these lousy candidates over the finish line — and that goes for Tea Party candidates, but it also goes for the so-called establishment candidates. We need better candidates across the board.”

Rove’s American Crossroads and GPS groups enjoyed some success helping Republicans in 2010, but their millions spent came to naught in 2012. This new initiative marks the first time his groups have openly become involved in Republican primaries.

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Short-Circuiting Sanctions: E.U. Courts Overturn Sanctions On Iranian Banks

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Photo Credit: APEuropean Union courts have quietly rolled back economic sanctions on several Iranian banks that have long been suspected of transferring funds to terrorist groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

The Wednesday announcement of the removal of Iran’s Bank Saderat from the E.U.’s sanctions list has caused concern among experts and some on Capitol Hill who warn the E.U.’s decision could erase years of progress on the economic sanctions front.

Bank Saderat is at least the third Iranian bank to have won an E.U. sanctions reprieve since December.

An E.U. court recently ruled that the sanctions against Bank Saderat were “illegal” and ordered they be removed, according to reports in Iran’s state run media.

“The General Court of the European Union consequently ruled that the sanctions imposed against the Iranian bank were illegal and accepted the bank’s request to lift the restrictions,” Iran’s Press TV quoted the bank as saying in a statement.

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‘Anonymous’ Hacks Federal Reserve Site

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. Photo Credit: Chip Somodevilla/GettyUS central bank confirms intrusion after hacktivist group Anonymous was claimed to have stolen 4,000 bankers’ details

The US Federal Reserve bank has confirmed one of its internal websites was broken into by hackers after the hacktivist group Anonymous was claimed to have stolen details of more than 4,000 bank executives.

“The Federal Reserve system is aware that information was obtained by exploiting a temporary vulnerability in a website vendor product,” a spokeswoman for the US central bank said.

“Exposure was fixed shortly after discovery and is no longer an issue. This incident did not affect critical operations of the Federal Reserve system,” the spokeswoman said, adding that all individuals affected by the breach had been contacted.

The admission follows a claim that hackers linked to Anonymous struck the bank on Sunday. The technology news site ZDNet separately reported that Anonymous appeared to have published information said to containing the login information, credentials, internet protocol addresses and contact information of more than 4,000 US bankers.

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Senate Dem Ron Wyden Threatens John Brennan’s CIA Nomination Over White House Drone Policy (+video)

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Photo Credit: APAmid growing furor, among both Republicans and Democrats, over revelations about the Obama administration’s use of drones for targeted killings, a prominent Senate Democrat on Wednesday made a thinly veiled threat to filibuster John Brennan’s CIA director nomination.

During a retreat for Senate Democrats in Annapolis, Md. Wednesday, Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, threatened to “pull out all the stops” in his effort to get access to the administration’s legal analysis for targeted killings of U.S. citizens suspected of being terrorists.

Speaking to reporters outside the retreat, Mr. Wyden, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, made several references to Mr. Brennan’s nomination and his central role in crafting the counterterrorism policy in the Obama White House, as well as his concern about the secrecy governing the administration’s drone policy.

“I want it understood that because this is such a central [issue], you have an individual with enormous influence who is really the architect of the counter terror policy in the Obama administration, that I am going to pull out all the stops to get the actual legal analysis because without it, in effect, the administration is practicing secret law,” he told the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call.

Mr. Wyden stopped short of saying he would filibuster the nomination, saying only he planned to bring it up during Mr. Brennan’s confirmation hearing Thursday before the Senate intelligence panel, the first round in what is expected to be an intense series of grillings by lawmakers.

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