JERUSALEM – In response to any future Israeli military strike on its nuclear sites, Iran has been training al-Qaida elements in the Egyptian Sinai desert on how to coordinate retaliatory attacks, a senior Egyptian security official told WND.

The al-Qaida attacks are meant to target both Israeli and Egyptian installations, the security official said, as part of an Iranian plot to widen any Israeli-Iranian conflict to involve other countries.

The Egyptian official said there is also information Iran has been working with Islamic Salafist groups in Jordan that are allied with al-Qaida.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guards helped to train al-Qaida elements in the Sinai and Gaza Strip to carry out large-scale attacks, including missile attacks, cross-border incursions, suicide bombings and explosions targeting infrastructure, such as oil and gas pipelines, the official said.

Any Iranian cooperation with al-Qaida would underscore the dangers of Tehran obtaining nuclear weapons. The country has a history of using terrorist proxies, most notably Hezbollah in Lebanon, to carry out its bidding.

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Read More at WND By Aaron Klein, WorldNetDaily

The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing.

The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.

Saved by the bailout, bankers lobbied against government regulations, a job made easier by the Fed, which never disclosed the details of the rescue to lawmakers even as Congress doled out more money and debated new rules aimed at preventing the next collapse.

A fresh narrative of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 emerges from 29,000 pages of Fed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and central bank records of more than 21,000 transactions. While Fed officials say that almost all of the loans were repaid and there have been no losses, details suggest taxpayers paid a price beyond dollars as the secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger.

‘Change Their Votes’

“When you see the dollars the banks got, it’s hard to make the case these were successful institutions,” says Sherrod Brown, a Democratic Senator from Ohio who in 2010 introduced an unsuccessful bill to limit bank size. “This is an issue that can unite the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. There are lawmakers in both parties who would change their votes now.”

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 Read More at bloomberg.com By Bob Ivry, Bradley Keuon, and Phil Kuntz, Bloomberg

Now that the Supreme Court has officially taken up the question of Obamacare, we are in store for even more legal analyses attempting to predict which way the justices will rule, or argue which way they ought to rule.

A quick prediction of my own: Few, if any, of these analyses will be as worthless as the one Einer Elhauge offers in today’s New York Times.

Elhauge, a law professor at Harvard University and founding director of Harvard’s Petrie-Flom Center in Health Law Policy, makes one point that is patently — inane? specious? vacuous? let’s go with specious — and one point that unintentionally undercuts his own argument. Let’s look at each.

First, the patently specious point:

For decades, Americans have been subject to a mandate to buy a health insurance plan — Medicare. Check your paystub, and you will see where your contributions have been deducted, whether or not you wanted Medicare health insurance.

Many opponents dismiss this argument because Medicare (unlike the new mandate) requires the purchase of health insurance as a condition of entering into a voluntary commercial relationship, namely employment, which Congress can regulate under the commerce clause. Thus, they say, the Medicare requirement regulates a commercial activity, whereas the new mandate regulates inactivity.

Now, I have followed the Obamacare debate pretty closely, including attending the oral arguments at the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals this summer, and I have never heard or read even a single person offering the rationale that Elhauge claims “many opponents” of the law make. However, I am willing to stipulate that the director of a center on health law policy may have been privy to more arguments than I have been, and that there may in fact have been some Obamacare opponents who have concocted such a line of reasoning.

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Read More at ajc.com By Kyle Wingfield, ajc.com

This year, we continue a cherished Thanksgiving tradition at Ringside Politics by bestowing our annual “Turkey of the Year” award to the most deserving politician or media personality.

This is always a very spirited competition because there are so many turkeys to consider. Previous winners have included former House Speaker Nancy “Botox Buffoon” Pelosi and former New Orleans politicians Mayor Ray “School Bus” Nagin and Congressman William “Dollar Bill” Jefferson.

To win this special award, the honoree has to best emulate our favorite Thanksgiving bird, the turkey. In other words, the winner must strut around acting as stupid as possible. A turkey’s brain is smaller than a walnut, among the tiniest in the animal kingdom. The turkey, while delicious to eat, possesses fewer brain cells than a cockroach. It qualifies for true bird brain status, which is why this holiday treat reminds us of so many people in the news today.

In the world of media and politics today, there is an endless supply of foolish politicians who strut around spouting nonsense. At the top of the list is President Obama who can strut and spout nonsense with the best of them. Whether the topic is socialized medicine, the lack of “shovel ready” jobs in his stimulus bill, higher taxes, increased spending, adding trillions to the national debt or apologizing for America; he can certainly blather on endlessly, especially if he has his teleprompter. He does have credibility on some subjects, such as basketball and community organizing, but on most issues, he is clueless and woefully unprepared. In this year’s competition, he was a strong candidate, finishing as our runner-up.

Sharing runner-up status with the President was the entire Occupy Wall Street movement, who continue to sound and smell like a bunch of turkeys. Many of these protesting fools are unaware of any goals for their movement; they just want free handouts and attention. They attracted the support of the typical idiotic Hollywood crowd like Susan Sarandon and Alec Baldwin. Actors are specialists at making foolish comments, especially when they offer inane encouragement to occupiers. If these actors really wanted to show support for the movement they would pitch a tent with the protesters and move into an occupied park. Don’t hold your breath waiting for these limousine liberal stars to actually mean what they say.

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 Read More at Western Journalism By Jeff Crouere, Western Journalism

United States Secretary of Energy Steve Chu did not exactly distinguish himself while testifying before the House Energy and Commerce Oversight Subcommittee about Solyndra, the so-called “green energy” company that received more than half a billion dollars in loan guarantees from the federal government.

That these same loan guarantees were refused by the Bush Energy Department in the waning days of that administration is only part of the story. That Solyndra is connected to major Obama donors and was permitted by the government to undertake a restructuring that allowed for private investors to be paid back before the U.S. taxpayers when the company went bust has made matters worse—and certainly increased interest in what happened—but that too is only part of the story.

There are lots of people in Washington who have identified Solyndra as part of a regime based on “crony capitalism” that has become the hallmark of the current administration. If that were all there was to it, things would be reasonably simple to sort out. In fact what happened at this one California-based company is only a symptom of a larger problem, one that threatens to grow over the next year and which reflects a fundamental flaw in the Obama energy policy: It is not based on anything reasonable.

The rush to create “green jobs” relies on technologies that have not been fully developed, have not proven their worth in the commercial sector and which, frankly, are more pie in the sky than anything else. That is not to say there is absolutely no role for solar and wind energy in the U.S. economy, but that the emphasis on these so-called renewables has come at the expense of traditional forms of energy. It also overlooks the very real fact that, as former Bush Energy Secretary Sam Bodman used to say, the most readily abundant source of new energy in the United States is that which everyday is wasted through inefficiency.

The Nobel prize-winning Chu and his associates would do well to consider that. Rather than try to create whole new industries using the tools of “crony capitalism” they might want to focus on ways to better utilize the energy the nation already produces. They would do well to take a look at what companies like Multistack, a Wisconsin-based privately held firm does.

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 Read More at cnsnews.com