Murkowski’s cover-up begins to unravel; top fisheries aide’s crewmate on the record with APRN

Murkowski has stated that she didn’t know until December 2010 that her top fisheries aide had committed multiple criminal acts years before.  But everyone else apparently knew.  NOAA Chief Lubchenco refused comment when asked directly whether she told Murkowski in 2009

By APRN (9/26/11):  When Senator Murkowski’s fisheries aide pulled out from consideration for an influential job in the Obama Administration two years ago, he said it was because the process was taking too long.  It turns out Arne Fuglvog was under investigation by the very agency he would have run.

Fuglvog pleaded guilty last month to breaking commercial fishing law before joining Murkowki’s staff.  His admission shook the commercial fishing industry in Alaska, where Fuglvog had served on influential councils.

Now, former crew members are coming forward saying they tried to turn Fuglvog in to authorities for years, and felt like they were ignored.

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Listen to the APRN interview HERE.

Head of the IMF warns that it needs billions more from member nations

By the Telegraph (9/26/11):  The head of the IMF has warned that its $384bn (£248bn) war chest designed as an emergency bail-out fund is inadequate to deliver the scale of the support required by troubled states.

In a document distributed to the IMF steering committee at the weekend, Ms Lagarde said: “The fund’s credibility, and hence effectiveness, rests on its perceived capacity to cope with worst-casescenarios. Our lending capacity of almost $400bn looks comfortable today, but pales in comparison with the potential financing needs of vulnerable countries and crisis bystanders.”

The suggestion came after European officials revealed they were working on a radical plan to boost their own bail-out fund, the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), from €440bn (£384bn) to around €3 trillion.

The plan to increase the EFSF firepower is the crucial part of a three-pronged strategy being designed by German and French authorities to stop the eurozone’s debt crisis spiralling out of control. It also includes a large-scale recapitalisation of European banks and a plan for an “orderly” Greek default.

Although Britain is not involved in the large-scale eurozone bail-out projects, it is liable for 4.5pc of IMF funding.

The plan, which would aim to build a “firebreak” around the indebted eurozone countries, emerged at the IMF annual meeting in Washington where global leaders united to demand urgent action from European politicians.

Despite the developments, traders warned that the failure of politicians to agree a solid rescue plan would result in more turbulence on global stock markets.

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Read more at the Telegraph HERE.

Experts testify that the US might panic if Congress were to identify economic “tipping point”

By Jim Angle (FoxNews.com):

The Joint Economic Committee, the bicameral group of legislators that reports on the nation’s economic picture, asked some troubling questions in a hearing Tuesday — what is the tipping point for the enormous debt the U.S. is carrying? And at what point do the nation’s debts start to weigh down the economy so much, it turns into a long-term slump?

Witnesses testifying on Tuesday said the nation shouldn’t even look for a tipping point, warning that the experiences of Greece or Italy and other heavily indebted nations show that the financial markets panic without warning.

“We know that the debt is now 100 percent — approximately 100 percent of (gross domestic product),” said Allan Meltzer, a professor of political economy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. “That doesn’t include the unfunded liabilities. It doesn’t include (mortgage lenders)Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It doesn’t include a number of other things.”

By unfunded liabilities, Meltzer means entitlement programs. Social Security and Medicare alone have $46 trillion in unfunded liabilities, meaning that much more is promised in benefits than the government — and taxpayers — have as a plan to pay for them.

But some economists, and the Obama administration, argue that cutting too much spending too quickly could slow the economy even further. One witness told the committee that spending should be cut only a little now, but he also argued it must be cut a lot in the future to make up for that.

“The government would commit to lower deficits in the future, without sharply cutting the current deficit,” said Laurence Ball, a professor of economics at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. “Just as one example of how this might be done, one could imagine cost-saving measures in entitlement programs, such as a higher retirement age, that could be phased in over time. With any luck, major spending cuts would occur only after the economy has recovered from its current slump.”

President Obama, in his latest plan to create jobs, dropped earlier proposals to do exactly that — to raise the eligibility age for Medicare and to change the inflation adjustment to Social Security payments.

The president has argued it is necessary to reform the programs in order to save them, but in deference to the Democratic base, he has only proposed cuts in payments to providers such as doctors and hospitals, at least until after 2017 when he would no longer be president even if he were to win a second term.

Chris Edwards, Director of Tax Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, argues that U.S. debt is so far out of control that it must be contained soon.

“We’ve had five trillion (in) deficit spending since 2008, the most enormous sort of Keynesian stimulus you can imagine, and yet we’ve had slower growth than any time since World War II. So I don’t think spending helps.”

Meltzer pointed to three “fiscal changes that really did enormous good.” One was the tax cuts from the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, the most effective part of which were business tax cuts.

“They got the biggest bang for the buck,” he said.

The second were the Reagan-era tax cuts which came in two rounds and boosted a flagging economy. Meltzer said a completely different option worked well too.

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Read More at FoxNews.com HERE.

Greece is imploding but US debt crisis is worse

By Laurence J. Kotlikoff (CNN):

Our government is utterly broke. There are signs everywhere one looks. Social Security can no longer afford to send us our annual benefit statements. The House can no longer afford its congressional pages. The Pentagon can no longer afford the pension and health care benefits of retired service members. NASA is no longer planning a manned mission to Mars.

We’re broke for a reason. We’ve spent six decades accumulating a huge official debt (U.S. Treasury bills and bonds) and vastly larger unofficial debts to pay for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits to today’s and tomorrow’s 100 million-plus retirees.

The government’s total indebtedness — its fiscal gap — now stands at $211 trillion, by my arithmetic. The fiscal gap is the difference, measured in present value, between all projected future spending obligations — including our huge defense expenditures and massive entitlement programs, as well as making interest and principal payments on the official debt — and all projected future taxes.

The data underlying this figure come straight from the horse’s mouth — the Congressional Budget Office. The CBO’s June 22 Alternative Fiscal Scenario presents nothing less than a Greek tragedy. It’s actually worse than the Greek tragedy now playing in Athens. Our fiscal gap is 14 times our GDP. Greece’s fiscal gap is 12 times its GDP, according to Professor Bernd Raffelhüschen of the University of Freiburg.

In other words, the U.S. is in worse long-term fiscal shape than Greece. The financial sharks are circling Greece because Greece is small and defenseless, but they’ll soon be swimming our way.

To grasp the magnitude of our nation’s insolvency, consider what tax hikes or spending cuts are needed to eliminate our fiscal gap. The answer is an immediate and permanent 64% increase in all federal revenues or an immediate and permanent 40% cut in all federal noninterest spending.

Such adjustments go miles beyond anything Congress and the president are considering.

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Read more at CNN.com HERE.

Banality of evil: The dirty secrets of Abortionist Tiller’s millions and Obama’s HHS Director Sebelius

“When Republican Attorney General Kline made serious efforts to hold Tiller to the law, Tiller invested a reputed $2 million in the 2006 election alone. This election assured the defeat of the incumbent Kline and the re-election of Democratic Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, now the secretary of health and human services. While still under criminal investigation, Tiller celebrated the victory with Sebelius at the governor’s mansion.”

By Jack Cashill (WND):  On Monday of this week, the Kansas Board of Healing Arts launched an inquiry into the medical practice of one Dr. Ann Kristin (Kris) Neuhaus.

If ever a civil procedure captured the essence of Hannah Arendt’s memorable phrase “the banality of evil,” it is surely this one.

Still, in its own anodyne way, this hearing is showing those who care to look what a stone cold serial killer was Neuhaus’ patron, the late abortionist, George Tiller. As such, it deserves much more attention that it has been getting.

For several years, Neuhaus made an unhealthy chunk of her income by providing Tiller the second opinion required under Kansas law for a third-trimester abortion.

According to that law, a doctor could abort a fully viable baby only if he and a second independent physician agreed that the abortion would prevent the mother from suffering a “substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function” or save her life.

Neuhaus was paid to rubber stamp Tiller’s opinion. In that late-term abortions do nothing positive for a woman’s physical health, Tiller almost always diagnosed an impending mental-health breakdown. As a result, all of Neuhaus’ second opinions under review concern the mother’s mental health.

Although Tiller claimed 60,000 late-term abortions over his long career, the Board focused its investigation on just 11 of them from 2003, all involving girls 18 and under whose babies had lived more than 25 weeks in the womb.

In the course of its first few days, the hearing shed more light on Tiller’s practices than had been shed in the seven or so years Tiller and/or Neuhaus had been under scrutiny.

Indeed, Tiller and the local media branded intrepid Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline as “Snoop Dog” for daring to probe into Tiller’s practice, and he had revealed nowhere near the information introduced by day two of the hearing.

Expert witness Dr. Liza Gold of Georgetown University withheld names but little else. Having reviewed the files, she shared the symptoms that led Tiller and Neuhaus to declare a “substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.”

One 15-year-old girl, for instance, had stated, “Horses are my life, and having kids would mess that up for barrel racing.”

Unwilling to diagnose RDS, “rodeo derivation syndrome,” Neuhaus chose “major depression, single episode.”

This thoroughly corrupt diagnosis allowed Tiller to take the life of a healthy baby fully capable of living outside the womb and a $6,000 fee to ease his conscience.

The transaction, however, was allowed to take place in Kansas only because Tiller had bought off the Democratic and moderate Republican establishment.

When Republican Attorney General Kline made serious efforts to hold Tiller to the law, Tiller invested a reputed $2 million in the 2006 election alone.

This election assured the defeat of the incumbent Kline and the re-election of Democratic Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, now the secretary of health and human services.

While still under criminal investigation, Tiller celebrated the victory with Sebelius at the governor’s mansion. The pictures are priceless.

Even with Sebelius’ help, in a deep red state like Kansas Tiller needed the media to hold off reform and keep his practice alive. This he did not even have to pay for.

In 2006, for its repeated slander of the “anti-choice extremist” Kline, the Kansas City Star won Planned Parenthood’s top media honor, the “Maggie Award,” named for its eugenicist founder, Margaret Sanger.

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Read more at WND HERE.

While the Economy Burns, Washington Fiddles

By JIM MCTAGUE (Barron’s):

America, get shovel-ready: There’s an onslaught of words heading your way from both Congress and the White House about the best way to repair our tottering fiscal edifice. President Obama is skipping about the country talking up his $447 billion jobs plan. Congressional Republicans have responded with high-sounding talk about “Liberating America’s Economy.”

The verbiage is intended to obscure the fact that hardly anyone here in the nation’s capital is actually rolling up his sleeves and tackling the underlying problem.

Politicians of all stripes are shirking responsibility—because to do otherwise might irritate one or another interest group; and the politicians are so unpopular already that they are loath to step on any toes, even if in the interest of doing the right thing. Collectively, the politicians are kicking their work loads down the proverbial road, well past the next election, in a craven strategy for political survival.

EVIDENCE OF THE DUCK-AND-COVER policy is everywhere. Rather than continuing the good fight last week against pork-barrel projects in both the highway bill and the Federal Aviation Administration appropriations bill, House Republicans folded under a hail of negative headlines and agreed to extend existing funding levels for a number of months. No doubt they will extend the funding several more times. They see no advantage in fireworks now that the election season has commenced.

The GOP partially shut down the FAA for two weeks this summer, in a fruitless attempt to get a leaner appropriations package passed. Paychecks failed to go out to some 75,000 workers and contractors. Senate Democrats opposed the FAA-reform measures because the GOP-led House had added antiunion language to the bill. Democrats also objected to a GOP call for the end of shockingly high subsidies to some rural airports. The poster child for the “Essential Air Service” subsidy: an airport in Ely, Nev., which receives $3,700-per-passenger annually from the federal government. The FAA bill has been extended 22 times since its authorization expired in 2007.

Meanwhile, neither party wants to trip up the highway bill, even though the highway-transportation trust fund is taking in less revenue from taxes than it is paying for road work. Balancing that budget would have caused the immediate loss of some 4,000 highway construction jobs. Few politicians want to cut jobs, even if it makes fiscal sense.

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Read more at Barron’s HERE.

Your tax dollars at work: GM workers to get thousands in bonuses

By Dee-Ann Durbin and Tom Krisher:

DETROIT (AP) — The United Auto Workers union won $5,000 signing bonuses and the possibility of sweeter profit-sharing checks as part of a new four-year contract with General Motors Co., two people briefed on the talks said Saturday.

The deal, which was reached late Friday, also includes a $2- to $3-per-hour pay raise for entry-level workers over the life of the contract and guarantees more union jobs, the people said.

Both persons asked to remain anonymous because the details of the contract haven’t been reviewed by all local union leaders.

The GM deal will serve as a template for contracts that still must be negotiated with Chrysler Group LLC and Ford Motor Co. It would set the pay and benefits for 112,500 U.S. auto workers. It also sets the bar for pay and benefits at nonunion auto companies and other industries across the country.

The contract is the first since GM and Chrysler received government bailouts to make it through bankruptcy protection in 2009. GM earned $4.7 billion last year.

Workers have to approve the deal before it can take effect. A vote is expected within 10 days.

In addition to the bonuses, workers could get profit-sharing checks that exceed the $4,000 that workers earned last year.

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Read more at Yahoo Finance HERE.

Top female Obama adviser: “I felt like a piece of meat”

Allegations of sexism, hostile work environment in White House

By David Gardner (Daily Mail):

Top female advisers felt left out by a boy’s club in the White House where rampant infighting sabotaged the administration’s economic decisions, according to a controversial new book.

Sidelined and ignored in the West Wing, some women aides reportedly complained to President Obama about their treatment in 2009.

In an excerpt obtained by the Washington Post, a female senior aide is quoted as calling the White House a hostile environment for women.

A new book alleges the White House can be a hostile environment for women to work in. President Obama, who goes home to a wife, two daughters and a mother-in-law at night, is not personally cited for any mistreatment

Former Communications Director Anita Dunn calls the work environment ‘hostile’ in the book, which she now denies having said

According to the Post, former White House Communications Director Anita Dunn says in the book: ‘This place would be in court for a hostile workplace because it actually fit all of the classic legal requirements for a genuinely hostile workplace to women.

Dunn denied to the Post that she made the remark, adding: ‘The president is someone who when he goes home at night he goes home to a house full of very strong women. He values having strong women around him.’

But Suskind’s book insists many women felt outmaneuvered by male colleagues such as former Chief-of-Staff Rahm Emanuel and, Larry Summers, former chairman of the National Economic Council.

‘I felt like a piece of meat,’ Christina Romer, former head of the Council of Economic Advisers, said of one meeting with Summers.

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Read more at Daily Mail HERE.

Mayor Bloomberg predicts large scale riots in US unless economy recovers

By ERIN EINHORN AND CORKY SIEMASZKO (Daily News):

Mayor Bloomberg warned Friday there would be riots in the streets if Washington doesn’t get serious about generating jobs.

“We have a lot of kids graduating college, can’t find jobs,” Bloomberg said on his weekly WOR radio show.

“That’s what happened in Cairo. That’s what happened in Madrid. You don’t want those kinds of riots here.”

In Cairo, angry Egyptians took out their frustrations by toppling presidential strongman Hosni Mubarak – and more recently attacking the Israeli embassy.

As for Madrid, the most recent street protests were sparked by widespread unhappiness that the Spanish government was spending millions on the visit of Pope Benedict instead of dealing with widespread unemployment.

Bloomberg’s unusually alarmist pronouncement came as President Obama has been pressuring reluctant Republicans to pass his proposed job creation plan.

“The damage to a generation that can’t find jobs will go on for many, many years,” the normally-measured mayor said.

Read more at the Daily News HERE.

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Obama unlikely to retaliate against a nuke attack on US?

By Aryeh Spero (American Thinker):

What if a Muslim country, such as Iran, launched a nuclear attack against us, or if agents aligned with Pakistan using dirty bombs were to attack America?  Would Barack Hussein Obama retaliate with nuclear force, as has been our stated policy since the 1950s?  Would he even unleash a barrage of non-nuclear shock and awe that would level those countries so that they’d be incapable of striking a second time?

When queried in Japan in November 2009, Mr. Obama declined to defend President Harry Truman’s nuclear attack on Hiroshima, despite it having saved hundreds of thousands of American soldiers who would have otherwise died trying to defeat the recalcitrant Japanese.  Many on the left and in academia have gone so far as to characterize it as a display of American racism, questioning if we would have done so had the victims been British.  They ignore the efficacy of how that one-time use of a nuclear weapon spared this country from ever being a victim of nuclear attack.

This is a question the president needs to be asked, given how he is a proponent of a doctrine labeled Responsibility to Protect, “R2P.”  The question is, though, what is Mr. Obama’s conceptual understanding of the term “responsibility” and how will it influence the manner in which he wages war?

The past may be a guide.  As with all references to “responsibility,” domestic or foreign, Obama sees responsibility as a type of sacrifice by the more powerful to those less powerful, be it redistribution of wealth or sacrificing one’s optimal protection when weighed against how it effects those he considers innocent.  A nuclear response to a nuclear attack on us, or even a devastating shock and awe campaign, would certainly kill many non-combatants Obama would consider innocent.

The assumption that, as with all presidents, Mr. Obama would do what is best for America and Americans cannot be taken for granted.  We’ve never before had a president who sees himself primarily as a citizen of the world and initiates policies not always in the best interests of America but in the interest of more important (to him) global goals: loans to Brazil for their offshore drilling, hundreds of millions to Palestinian Arabs and Muslim countries — increasing an already unbearable debt on Americans to do so.  Not to mention how he has tried every which way to stop Arizonans (Americans) from protecting themselves from murder, rape, thievery, and destruction of their property from mobs cascading into our open borders — doing so, as he always does, by invoking some universalist “morality” and mission that, in his mind, supersede our parochial needs.  He has reneged on our commitment for a space shield for our allies in Eastern Europe while offering it to Russia, a threat to America.

Indeed, Obama has spent much time traversing the globe apologizing to all those countries that he claims have been the target of “arrogant” American military power.  Would he, then, be inclined to use the essence of American military power, its nuclear force?  Many around the world will not be deterred from going nuclear against us unless it is unequivocally understood that they will be annihilated if they do so.

Read more at American Thinker HERE.

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