The Price Of Gas Is Outrageous – And It Is Going To Go Even Higher

Does it cost you hundreds of dollars just to get to work each month? If it does, you are certainly not alone. There are millions of other Americans in the exact same boat. In recent years, the price of gas in the United States has gotten so outrageous that it has played a major factor in where millions of American families have decided to live and in what kind of vehicles they have decided to purchase. Many Americans that have very long commutes to work end up spending thousands of dollars on gas a year. So when the price of gas starts going up to record levels, people like that really start to feel it. But the price of gas doesn't just affect those that drive a lot. The truth is that the price of gas impacts each and every one of us. Almost everything that we buy has to be transported, and when the price of gasoline goes up the cost of shipping goods also rises. The U.S. economy has been structured around cheap oil. It was assumed that we would always be able to transport massive quantities of goods over vast distances very inexpensively. Once that paradigm totally breaks down, we are going to be in a huge amount of trouble. For the moment, the big concern is the stress that higher gas prices are going to put on the budgets of ordinary American families. Unfortunately, almost everyone agrees that in the short-term the price of gas is going to go even higher.

Would you rather live in the America of 1950 or the America of 2012? Has the United States changed for the better over the last 62 years? Many fondly remember the 1950s and the 1960s as the "golden age" of America. We emerged from World War II as the wealthiest and most powerful nation on the planet. During that time period, just about anyone that wanted to get a job could find a job and the U.S. middle class expanded rapidly. Back in 1950, America was still considered to be a "land of opportunity" and the economy was growing like crazy. There was less crime, there was less divorce, the American people had much less debt and the world seemed a whole lot less crazy. Most of the rest of the world deeply admired us and wanted to be more like us. Of course there were a lot of things that were not great about America back in 1950, and there are many things that many of us dearly love that we would have to give up in order to go back and live during that time. For example, there was no Internet back in 1950. Instead of being able to go online and read the articles that you want to read, your news would have been almost entirely controlled by the big media companies of the day. So there are definitely some advantages that we have today that they did not have back in 1950. But not all of the changes have been for the better. America is in a constant state of change, and many are deeply concerned about where all of these changes are taking us.

Not so fast. Those that are publicly declaring that an economic recovery has arrived are ignoring a whole host of numbers that indicate that the U.S. economy is in absolutely horrendous shape. The truth is that the health of an economy should not be measured by how well the stock market is doing. Rather, the truth health of an economy should be evaluated by looking at numbers for things like jobs, housing, poverty and debt. Some of the latest economic statistics indicate that unemployment is getting a little bit worse, that the housing market continues to deteriorate, that poverty in America continues to soar and that our debt problem is worse than ever. If we were truly experiencing the kind of economic recovery that the United States has experienced after every other post-World War II recession we would see a sharp improvement across the board in most of our economic statistics. But that simply is not happening. Sadly, this is about as much of an "economic recovery" as we are going to get because soon the economy will be getting much worse. So enjoy this period of relative stability while you can.

Coup D’etat: Pentagon & Obama Declare Congress Ceremonial

Congressman Jones introduces bill that would subject Panetta & Obama to impeachment
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s testimony asserting that the United Nations and NATO have supreme authority over the actions of the United States military, words which effectively declare Congress a ceremonial relic, have prompted Congressman Walter Jones to introduce a resolution that re-affirms such behavior as an “impeachable high crime and misdemeanor” under the Constitution.

White House pushes back on report of deal with Israelis over Iran strike

The White House artfully pushed back Thursday on a report in an Israeli newspaper that claimed the U.S. offered Israel high-tech weaponry like bunker-busting bombs and refueling planes in exchange for a pledge to hold off on attacking Iran until 2013.

The Nuclear Double Standard on Israel is the Main Obstacle to Peace

John Glaser

While widely recognized in antiwar circles and on the left, the issue of a nuclear weapons double standard in the Middle East is one of the least appreciated when it comes to the Iran nuclear debate. As President Obama curries favor with Israel and AIPAC, he is heaping punitive sanctions on the Iranian people and continuously issuing public threats of preventive war.
Iran’s crime? Well, it hasn’t committed one, even according to the leadership in both the U.S. and Israel. But they allege Iran is being intentionally opaque regarding the true intentions of its currently civilian nuclear program. This is what people see as a double standard: While Iran is a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, has publicly pledged its opposition to nuclear weapons development, has subjected itself to thorough international inspections, and in fact has exactly zero nuclear weapons, Israel has done none of the above and has approximately 200 nuclear warheads. Iran is being severely punished and threatened with attack, Israel is supported with unparalleled economic, military, and diplomatic support.

The MEK’s Useful Idiots

by Philip Giraldi

If you are a Muslim American who is appalled by U.S. foreign policy, most specifically its penchant for invading Islamic countries in a bid to change their regimes, and you make the mistake of saying something to that effect on the phone or writing about your concerns in an email, there is a good chance that the FBI will come after you. You will in short order find yourself with a new friend who is a Muslim just like you and who shares your frustration with American foreign policy. At a certain point he will reveal his affiliation with a certain overseas group that is interested in obtaining revenge for all the Muslims who have been killed or injured by the United States. He will suggest that doing something about the problem would be neither sinful nor really wrong, and he will hint that he has access to the weapons or bombs that could be used for a revenge attack. You take the bait. The bomb or gun is a dud and the new friend turns out to be an FBI informant. Another “terrorist” is arrested and sent to jail for 20 years. End of story.

BARAK OBAMA FAVORITE FILM ; Cosmic Slop Space Traders pt2.mpg

OBAMA" S FAVORITE FILM: Cosmic Slop Space Traders pt1.mpg

Revealed: Derrick Bell's HBO Sci-Fi Blaxploitation Flick

by Joel B. Pollak

Derrick Bell, the man whose scholarship inspired Barack Obama, was the Jeremiah Wright of academia.

And a Hollywood cult hero.
Bell was one of the chief proponents of Critical Race Theory, a radical doctrine that holds that American legal institutions—including our civil rights laws—perpetuate white supremacy.
Bell’s ideas were not only radical, but bizarre. After leaving Harvard (he resigned in 1992), he wrote a racialist, antisemitic fictional essay titled “The Space Traders,” which Ninth Circuit judge Alex Kozinski described in the New York Times with disgust:

by J. Christian Adams

Breitbart.com has revealed that while at Harvard Law School, Barack Obama embraced the racially charged cause of professor Derrick Bell.

Both Obama and Bell demanded that Harvard hire professors on the basis of race. Obama and other students rallied to Bell’s side after Bell quit teaching in an attempt to force Harvard to implement race-based hiring policies.

by Ben Shapiro

Below is footage of Barack Obama praising and hugging Professor Derrick Bell. It was spliced and diced by the media to avoid showing just how close Obama was to Bell. More than that, a close associate of the Obama campaign, Harvard Law School’s Professor Charles Ogletree, admitted on our exclusive tape, “We hid this throughout the 2008 campaign. I don’t care if they find it now.”

Well, we found it. And it is damaging, because Barack Obama was as close or closer to Derrick Bell than he ever was to Jeremiah Wright. Obama didn’t merely sit in the pews – or not -- for Derrick Bell. He didn’t just hang out with Derrick Bell for prayers. He said:

It brings a tear to the eye

by A.O. | MOSCOW

WITH hundreds of military trucks, menacing police vans, hovering helicopters and tens of thousands of soldiers and riot police in full gear, Moscow felt like an occupied city last night.
And so it was. Manezh Square, in front of the Kremlin, and a good portion of Tverskaya, the city’s main shopping street, were taken by a crowd of some 100,000 grim-looking people dressed mostly in black, who were brought in to celebrate the victory of Vladimir Putin. Russia's outgoing prime minister officially won more than 64% of the vote in yesterday's presidential election.

Lexington

What might Ayatollah Ali Khamenei be making of America’s noisy Iran talk this week?

HERE in Iran I have been finding it hard to make sense of all the strident utterances about the Islamic Republic emanating from America’s capital this week. Being Supreme Leader, I need to understand what my enemy is thinking. Being an ayatollah, I can modestly say that I am something of an expert in textual exegesis. Nonetheless, I confess that I’m puzzled.

The Republicans

The Republican front-runner should be talking about jobs above all

IT WAS not, to be honest, all that super. Only ten states voted on March 6th, compared with the 21 that voted on the last Super Tuesday in 2008; and they delivered a mixed message. Mitt Romney, the front-runner, won six of them. His nearest rival, Rick Santorum, won three, and came within a percentage point of wresting the main catch of the day, Ohio, away from him. The remaining state, Georgia, went to its native son, Newt Gingrich: maybe just enough to prevent his campaign from dissolving in its own bombast. Ron Paul, a strident libertarian, won nothing, but his campaign will soldier on to the end.

Nuclear power

A year after Fukushima, the future for nuclear power is not bright—for reasons of cost as much as safety

THE enormous power tucked away in the atomic nucleus, the chemist Frederick Soddy rhapsodised in 1908, could “transform a desert continent, thaw the frozen poles, and make the whole world one smiling Garden of Eden.” Militarily, that power has threatened the opposite, with its ability to make deserts out of gardens on an unparalleled scale. Idealists hoped that, in civil garb, it might redress the balance, providing a cheap, plentiful, reliable and safe source of electricity for centuries to come. But it has not. Nor does it soon seem likely to.

Posted by Bill Conroy -

Another source, a past employee, also claims narco-entrepreneur is connected to rightwing paramilitary forces

Narco News won an historic legal battle in 2001 when the New York Supreme Court dismissed a libel suit filed against the online publication by a giant Mexican bank. In the process, the court also extended critical free-press protections for the first time to Internet news sites and reporters.

Narco News publisher Al Giordano, and his longtime ally, Mexican journalist Mario Menendez, publisher of the Mexican daily Por Esto!, stood as defendants in that litigation against the powerful lender Banco Nacional de Mexico S.A.(Banamex), led and controlled at the time by banker Roberto Hernandez Ramirez.

At the heart of the litigation was the following claim:

Posted by Bill Conroy -

Turf Wars, Agency Budgets and Case Stats Trump Lives in the Era of Prohibition
Ever since ATF’s Fast and Furious gun-running operation was catapulted into the national spotlight in early 2011, the focus has been on the politics influencing the police work and the manipulations behind intelligence operations, with little to no attention paid to the dysfunction of the drug-war bureaucracy.
A report released by the US Government Accountability Office in June 2009, some three months before Operation Fast and Furious was even launched, underscores that dysfunction in succinct detail. Advance copies of that report were provided at the time to “the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice, and State and to the Office of National Drug Control Policy,” GAO documents state.

In that now two-and-a-half-year-old report is a blistering indictment of operations, obviously already in existence prior to June 2009 and Fast and Furious, that utilized a strategy similar to that employed in Fast and Furious — which allowed criminals to “walk” thousands of guns into Mexico under the watch of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (better known as ATF). The supposed goal: identify and bring to justice the higher-ups in Mexico’s arms trafficking organizations.
Here are the money graphs from the GAO report:

Posted by Bill Conroy -

Reported US Military Ramp-up on the Border Follows Years of ATF-Sanctioned Gun Running
U.S. troops deployed to the US/Mexican border last week may well be there, in part, to deal with the blowback from ATF's botched Fast and Furious gambit.
Veteran border reporter Diana Washington Valdez of The El Paso Times reported late last week that “active-duty soldiers” from Fort Bliss, just north of El Paso, Texas, have been deployed to support the US Border Patrol in the Arizona and New Mexico border region.
Tosh Plumlee, a longtime CIA operative, who has been actively monitoring the New Mexico border region for years, also confirms that at least a half dozen “government vans” packed with US soldiers were spotted in recent days on a highway leading into Columbus, N.M., which is just across the border (some 3 miles) from Palomas, Mexico — a hotbed of narco- and weapons- trafficking activity in recent years.
Plumlee says the deployment is likely part of an ongoing joint Mexican and US military task-force operation that has been active since at least 2009. Narco News reported on some of the activities of that joint op in mid-2010, including the fact that small teams of US special operations soldiers were active on the Mexican side of the border, imbedded with the Mexican military.

However, neither Plumlee, nor The El Paso Times report, shed any definitive light on the precise nature of the recent US troop deployment along the border, specifically in the Columbus area. Plumlee has told Narco News previously, though, that there have been numerous reports of suspected weapons stashes concealed in the desolate moon-like landscape surrounding Columbus and Palomas — near landmarks such as Guzman Lookout Mountain and Coyote Hill to the east of Columbus.
In fact, several days ago, on the evening of Feb. 16, Plumlee says he was traveling along the border near Columbus when he came across the echoes of a firefight playing out just across the border. It’s not clear, Plumlee adds, who was engaged in that shootout, but it is certain, he says, that there were live rounds ripping through the air. He tape-recorded his experience that evening, providing the play-by-play of the action — a recording that can be found at this link.

Steve Forbes,

In reaffirming its near 0% interest rate policy for another three years the Federal Reserve averred that this was necessary to revive the housing market, which, in turn, was necessary for the economy to revive. House building and the buying and selling of existing homes are meaningful parts of the economy. More important, from the Fed’s perspective a house is the biggest asset for millions of people; therefore, higher values mean owners will be more likely to spend.
This reasoning is arse backwards.

By Karl Rove

Mitt nearly erased the gap among non-college graduates and once again carried Catholic voters.

Every Republican running for president got something on Super Tuesday. Not all they wanted, but enough to convince themselves to carry on, making it likely the GOP race goes on for months, not weeks.
Ron Paul didn't finally win a state. But he took 41% of the vote in Virginia—his highest percentage in this primary season—and picked up 22 delegates in the evening's 10 contests.
Newt Gingrich won Georgia—the state that elected him to Congress for nearly two decades—with almost half the vote, a strong performance. He would have lost all credibility had he lost. He had failed to turn in enough signatures to get on the Virginia ballot, and he came in third in the other Southern states up for grabs on Tuesday, behind Rick Santorum (who took the gold medal in Tennessee and Oklahoma) and Mitt Romney (who took the silver in both). The former House speaker must now win Alabama or Mississippi next week even to remain a regional candidate.

By Bob McTeer

My house is under water, for sure

My car is upside down, you bet

But I’m getting me a consolidation loan

And finally getting out of debt

Bob McTeer

Well, it may be hard to borrow your way out of debt, but sometimes it buys time, and time is money. One of the few major contributions to the European debt crisis is the ECB’s lending to European banks. Long-term low-interest loans help the banks themselves as well as put them in a position to buy European sovereign debt, an excess of which is the main problem. It buys debtor countries some time to become less so. It goes a long way toward making the European debt crisis a condition that doesn’t portend disaster tomorrow.

Vulture Capitalism. John Stossel

Now that Mitt Romney is likely to be the Republican nominee, we can expect new attacks on his "vulture capitalism." That's how Rick Perry characterized his private equity work. Newt Gingrich's supporters ran an ad about Romney's firm, Bain Capital, that said, "Their greed was only matched by their willingness to do anything to make millions in profits."
Give me a break.
"Greed" means you want more for yourself. Fine. If you obtain it legally, without force or privilege — say, by buying a business and making it more efficient, or shifting resources to where consumers prefer them — that is a good thing. "Creative destruction" makes America richer.

Too Many Laws!

by John Stossel |

My last Fox News special "Illegal Everything" showed how government's mountain of rules stifle entrepreneurs and make criminals out of everyday people. I tried to open my own lemonade stand but New York City made it difficult. The government said I had to pass a 15-hour food protection class, which included questions about barracuda and puffer fish.

60 Second Refutation of Socialism, While Sitting at the Beach

Last week, there were several comments in Carnival of the Capitalists that people would like to see more articles highlighting the benefits of capitalism. This got me thinking about a conversation I had years ago at the beach:

Hanging out at the beach one day with a distant family member, we got into a discussion about capitalism and socialism. In particular, we were arguing about whether brute labor, as socialism teaches, is the source of all wealth (which, socialism further argues, is in turn stolen by the capitalist masters). The young woman, as were most people her age, was taught mainly by the socialists who dominate college academia nowadays. I was trying to find a way to connect with her, to get her to question her assumptions, but was struggling because she really had not been taught many of the fundamental building blocks of either philosophy or economics, but rather a mish-mash of politically correct points of view that seem to substitute nowadays for both.

by Don Boudreaux

Here’s a letter to the New York Times:
Hayley Gorenberg and others who support “hate-crime” legislation (“Even Nonviolent Crime Needs to Be Fought,” March 8th) endorse – no doubt unawares – a source of tyranny that dates back ages, namely, ruling-elites’ attempts to govern people’s thoughts.
In the past, thought-policing was aimed at controlling individuals’ notions about sacred texts and other theocratic matters. Today, thought-policing is aimed at controlling individuals’ notions about sexual practices, racial and gender differences, and lifestyles. But today as yesterday – and regardless of the ungodliness or shamefulness of the targeted thoughts – no institution is to be trusted that empowers some men and women to peer into the minds of other men and women for the purpose of forcing people’s thoughts to conform to an official standard.
The great early 17th-century English jurist, Sir Edward Coke – whose writings greatly influenced America’s founding generation – famously challenged King James I’s effort to deploy the power of the English crown to punish people merely for what they thought. Coke proclaimed that “No man ecclesiastical or temporal shall be examined upon secret thoughts of his heart…. Cogitationis poenam nemo emeret – no man may be punished for his thoughts –’For it hath been said in the Proverb, Thought is free.’”*
That maxim is today as important a bulwark against tyranny as it was 400 years ago.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

“Rattle The Turbans” – Defeating Iran in Syria

Charles Hill |

“What are the range of options open to the United States, and other powers, in the face of the large-scale violence that the Assad regime has unleashed on the Syrian people?”
Reporters covering the Obama Administration’s foreign policy have provided the answer: “the U.S. sees few good options in Syria” (Washington Post, 12 Feb 2012). Those living in a time of revolution, it has been said, often don’t realize it. Washington does not seem to understand that what is going on in the Middle East is a world-historical (not merely regional) event.

US: Obama is America’s Lenin – by Jeffrey T. Kuhner

Why does President Obama despise Christianity? Recently, his administration ruled most religious organizations must provide health insurance to employees that covers free contraception and sterilization procedures — including the morning-after pill. The decision provoked a furor among Catholics and non-Catholics. They rightly understood that the contraceptive mandate violates religious freedom and the conscience rights of the Catholic Church.

As Syrian tanks and artillery continued to rain indiscriminate fire on the defenseless city of Homs and as the world watched with mounting horror the final reports of courageous American journalist Marie Colvin, half a world away, in Caracas, Venezuela, a truculent and defiant Hugo Chavez continues to stand four-square behind the Bashar al-Assad regime.

Thursday, March 8, 2012

White House pushes back on report of deal with Israelis over Iran strike

Derrick Bell, the man whose scholarship inspired Barack Obama, was the Jeremiah Wright of academia.

Breitbart.com has revealed that while at Harvard Law School, Barack Obama embraced the racially charged cause of professor Derrick Bell.

It brings a tear to the eye

Lexington

What might Ayatollah Ali Khamenei be making of America’s noisy Iran talk this week?

The Republicans

The Republican front-runner should be talking about jobs above all

Nuclear power

A year after Fukushima, the future for nuclear power is not bright—for reasons of cost as much as safety

Posted by Bill Conroy -

Posted by Bill Conroy -

Posted by Bill Conroy -

By Karl Rove

Mitt nearly erased the gap among non-college graduates and once again carried Catholic voters.

By Bob McTeer

by Don Boudreaux

Charles Hill |

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