Michele Bachmann Says Obama Wants to ‘Lift Up the Islamists’ and Allow Sharia Law in America

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Representative Michele Bachmann has claimed that Barack Obama is determined ‘to lift up the Islamists’ and bow to their ‘ultimate demand’ of imposing Sharia law on America.

In an extraordinary interview at the weekend, the woman who once had high hopes of being the Republican candidate in this year’s presidential election, said that Americans should study Islamist texts just as those worried about fascism pored over Adolf Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ in the 1930s and 1940s.

In an extended on-air conversation with conservative radio hosts Jan Markell and Eric Barger, Bachmann contended that Obama was endangering the United States and Israel by supporting radical Islamists.

‘President Obama, if you look at nearly every decision he has made about this issue, it is to lift up the Islamists and to take down Israel.’

The congresswoman, who won the Republican presidential straw poll in Ames, Iowa, in 2011 and who narrowly won re-election to the House of Representatives last month, said that Americans who are not Islamists will ‘lose their right of speech and expression’ because there was ‘no tolerance for dissent or disagreeing in any way with the goals or the beliefs of the Islamists’.

She said: ‘Not just verbal speech, but written, a cartoon, a painting, whatever it is, if it is in any way construed as being against Islam that is where the confrontation comes from the Islamist world and they want to stop anyone in the world from saying anything negative about Islam.

‘Which means there is only one free speech right and that would belong to the Islamists. Everyone else would lose their right of speech and expression.’

It would be ‘game over’ for America’ if free speech were denied because ‘once you criminalised anti-Islamic speech, anything that we would say that would be critical in any way of anything Islam does would be considered criminalised.’

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Census: Whites No Longer a Majority in US by 2043

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WASHINGTON (AP) — White people will no longer make up a majority of Americans by 2043, according to new census projections. That’s part of a historic shift that already is reshaping the nation’s schools, workforce and electorate, and is redefining long-held notions of race.

The official projection, released Wednesday by the Census Bureau, now places the tipping point for the white majority a year later than previous estimates, which were made before the impact of the recent economic downturn was fully known.

America continues to grow and become more diverse due to higher birth rates among minorities, particularly for Hispanics who entered the U.S. at the height of the immigration boom in the 1990s and early 2000s. Since the mid-2000 housing bust, however, the arrival of millions of new immigrants from Mexico and other nations has slowed from its once-torrid pace.

The country’s changing demographic mosaic has stark political implications, shown clearly in last month’s election that gave President Barack Obama a second term – in no small part due to his support from 78 percent of non-white voters.

There are social and economic ramifications, as well. Longstanding fights over civil rights and racial equality are going in new directions, promising to reshape race relations and common notions of being a “minority.” White plaintiffs now before the Supreme Court argue that special protections for racial and ethnic minorities dating back to the 1960s may no longer be needed, from affirmative action in college admissions to the Voting Rights Act, designed for states with a history of disenfranchising blacks.

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600 Workers To Be Fired As Controversial Activist Judge Sides With Obama-NLRB And SEIU Strikers

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A Democrat-appointed federal judge with a controversial past and a “weird record of empathy for those accused of sexual crimes involving children” has sided with Barack Obama’s National Labor Relations Board and the Service Employees International Union by ordering a nursing home chain whose SEIU workers are striking to reinstate the strikers. The judge’s decision to side with the NLRB and SEIU will cause more than 600 replacement caregivers’ employment to be terminated.

To make matters worse, among those who will be reinstated will be SEIU strikers who are alleged to have committed acts of sabotage against nursing home residents (including Alzheimer’s patients) when the union struck back in July.

On Tuesday, federal judge Robert N. Chatigny weighed in on a nearly two-year old labor battle between SEIU-affiliated New England Health Care Employees Union, District 1199 and New Jersey-based Healthbridge Management by granting an injunction to temporarily halt to Healthbridge Management’s June implementation of its “last, best and final offer.”

At issue is whether Healthbridge management and the union were, after 19 months of negotiations, at a lawful impasse when the company implemented its final offer in June.

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Checking Facebook at Work Could Become Illegal

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Logging into Facebook, perusing eBay and surfing to other decidedly non-work related sites may not just upset your boss; it could also be a federal offense.

That’s according to two Boston College professors who recently authored a paper on how a broad interpretation of the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) could criminalize the routine behavior of every employee who uses a workplace computer in their job.

As the First, Fifth, Seventh and Eleventh Circuit Courts of Appeal interpret it, a breach of a company’s computer policy for example a ban on accessing dating sites and social media for example, also constitutes a violation of the CFAA.

The law was originally written to punish and deter criminal hacking, but as technology experts point out, innovation in technology has outpaced the laws that govern it.

The CFAA, a 1986 law that predates HTTP and the Web as we know it, makes it a crime to “access a computer without authorization or exceed authorized access … from [a] protected computer.” Based on the law’s own definitions, a “protected computer” is virtually any device with a microprocessor and a network connection. Today, virtually everyone “accesses” one when they point their browser to any webpage.

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Welcome to QE4!

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photo credit: dctim1

The actions of the Federal Reserve over the past 4 years exemplify insanity more than anything else in politics. They continue implementing one monetary stimulus policy after another in an attempt to jumpstart the economy, even though they keep failing in that goal. We had QE1,2,3 and Operations Twist 1 and 2. Now the Fed’s Open Market Committee has announced a new monetary stimulus package that can only be described as QE4.

Evidently, the economy was recovering enough for Obama to win reelection, but not enough to end the market distorting, dollar-destroying stimulus from the unelected governors at the Fed. So not only will the Fed continue purchasing $40 billion in mortgage-backed securities per month, they will engage in another round of buying long-term treasuries:

“To support a stronger economic recovery and to help ensure that inflation, over time, is at the rate most consistent with its dual mandate, the Committee will continue purchasing additional agency mortgage-backed securities at a pace of $40 billion per month. The Committee also will purchase longer-term Treasury securities after its program to extend the average maturity of its holdings of Treasury securities is completed at the end of the year, initially at a pace of $45 billion per month. The Committee is maintaining its existing policy of reinvesting principal payments from its holdings of agency debt and agency mortgage-backed securities in agency mortgage-backed securities and, in January, will resume rolling over maturing Treasury securities at auction. Taken together, these actions should maintain downward pressure on longer-term interest rates, support mortgage markets, and help to make broader financial conditions more accommodative.”

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It’s Good to be Connected: Goldman Sachs’ Miniscule CFTC Fine Is A Joke

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Last week, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) slapped Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) with a $1.5 million fine over inadequate control measures in its trading system which allowed an employee to falsify trades worth $8.3 billion in 2007. (CFTC Orders Goldman, Sachs & Co., a Commission Registrant, to Pay $1.5 Million for Supervision Failures, CFTC Press Releases, Dec 7 2012)) Goldman lost $118 million in the process of unwinding the positions.

We believe the global investment bank has been lucky on both fronts: while the fine amount in itself is too small to be material to the bank, the loss from the position is but a fraction of what the bank could have potentially lost. After all, we have witnessed the damage that wrong multi-billion dollar trading decisions by a single individual can do to a bank’s reputation and business on two distinct occasions in the recent past – the unauthorized trading incident at UBS (NYSE:UBS) last year (see Questionable Risk Controls Cost UBS More than Rogue Trades) and the hedging portfolio loss at JPMorgan (NYSE:JPM) this June (see JPMorgan’s Trading Losses Could Climb, Sold Profitable Securities To Cushion Impact).

We maintain a $127 price estimate for Goldman’s stock, which is about 5% above the current market price.

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Michigan Governor Rick Snyder Signs Right to Work Legislation Into Law

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It’s official: Michigan has become the 24th Right to Work state:

At a news conference at the George W. Romney Building steps away from the state Capitol, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) announced that he’d signed the contentious right-to-work measures that have sparked protests in the state.

Before dozens of reporters assembled inside a conference room on the building’s second floor, Snyder defended his move as one that would lead to ”more jobs coming to Michigan.”

The two bills bar unions from making contracts that require employees to pay labor dues. One bill dealt with public sector unions, exempting firefighters and police officers. The other covered the private sector.

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U.S. Military Sends Mystery Space Drone back Into Orbit, Mission Unknown

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The U.S. military launched its highly secretive unmanned $1 billion X-37B space plane into orbit today from Cape Canaveral on top of an Atlas V rocket.

The U.S. Air Force which operates the small, top-secret version of the space shuttle still will not say how long the third X-37B mission will last, nor what the vehicle will be doing in orbit.

Cloud coverage in the area had threatened to scupper today’s launch, but the skies cleared sufficiently for the classified mission to take-off on time at 1.03 p.m from the Florida space center.

It is the second flight for this original X-37B spaceplane. The craft circled the planet for seven months in 2010. A second X-37B spacecraft spent more than a year in orbit.

The high-tech mystery machines – 29 feet long – are about one-quarter the size of NASA’s old space shuttles and can land automatically on a runway.

The two previous touchdowns occurred in Southern California; this one might end on NASA’s three-mile-long runway once reserved for the space agency’s shuttles.

The military isn’t saying much if anything about this new secret mission known as OTV-3, or Orbital Test Vehicle, flight No. 3. In fact, launch commentary ended 17 minutes into the flight and a news blackout followed.

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Sotomayor Memoir: Husband Brought Bag of Quaaludes to Wedding Night, Unknowingly Drove Cousin to Shoot Up Heroin

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor says in her upcoming memoir that her lifelong battle against diabetes and the fear that she might die early played a big part in her decision not to have children.

The 58-year-old Sotomayor says in an unusually personal book for a Supreme Court justice that she feels an occasional tug of regret at not having borne or adopted children. The memoir, “My Beloved World,” is being published by Alfred A. Knopf in January. An early copy was sent by the publisher to The Associated Press.

Sotomayor also defends affirmative action — under which she was admitted to Princeton University and Yale Law School — as needed to get disadvantaged students to the starting line of a race to success. She grew up so poor in the South Bronx that her family never even had a bank account.

She acknowledges she entered through a special door reserved for minority students but writes that her accomplishments at Princeton, including receiving the highest prize given to seniors, earning a place in the Phi Beta Kappa honor society and graduating with highest honors, speak for themselves.

Sotomayor received an advance of nearly $1.2 million for the book, which Knopf will publish simultaneously in English and Spanish. The book does not deal with the more than three years Sotomayor has served as a justice or the previous 17 years she spent as a U.S. district and appeals court judge.

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Fox News Contributor Punched in Face at Pro-Union Protests in Michigan (+video)

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A Fox News contributor was punched in the face during a pro-union protest Tuesday in Michigan, one of a series of confrontations between union demonstrators and opponents on the day the state Legislature approved so-called “right to work” legislation that unions oppose.

Steven Crowder, a conservative comedian and Fox News contributor, had spent the day questioning demonstrators, and video he posted on YouTube showed some of them becoming verbally aggressive, with one telling him, “get the f— out of my face!”

Another protester can be seen later in the video punching Crowder in the face before being restrained by another man.

Crowder later posted photos on his Twitter account showing a chipped tooth and “minor cut on forehead.” He told the website TheBlaze.com that the scuffle started when protesters tried to tear down a tent set up by conservative organization Americans for Prosperity.

“They were trying to tear down the tent and people were trying to pull them off. … And as they did that, a few people tripped,” he told the website. “This guy tripped over a tent peg and then got up and hit me.”

Watch video:

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