http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2088/Let-the-PrObamedia-Sweepstakes-Begin.aspx It’s 2012 and the PrObamedia are back, not that they ever left, of course. But now, as Mitt Romney emerges as the main obstacle between the PrObamedia and their collectivist heart’s desire — Obama, Term II — their work gets serious. I hereby initiate an occasional feature, the PrObamedia Sweepstakes, to recognize the hard […]
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=1712 Grass’ satanic verses It was all too predictable that the minor brouhaha over Gunter Grass’s recent poem, “What Must Be Said,” would turn into a major attack on Israel. More specifically, as soon as Interior Minister Eli Yishai announced that Grass would henceforth be considered persona non grata in the Jewish state, suddenly the […]
History painting http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2012/04/11/history-painting/ This morning, a friend send me this image of a painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme. Some say that it depicts Victoria and Albert receiving the Siamese embassy. Recent historical research, however, suggests that it actually depicts the liberal media at an Obama press conference. (Chris Matthews may be third from the front.) […]
http://news.investors.com/article/607184/201204100801/obamacare-will-explode-deficits-study-shows.htm?src=HPLNews
President Obama’s signature health reform law will add as much as $527 billion to federal deficits over the next decade, not cut them as advertised, according to a report released Tuesday.
The Affordable Care Act will add as much as $1.2 trillion to federal spending between 2012 and 2021, the report also finds. Charles Blahous, who serves as one of Medicare’s trustees, wrote the report, published by George Mason University’s Mercatus Center.
President Obama has said that the law will cut deficits by more than $140 billion over its first 10 years, and “reduce our deficit by $1 trillion” in the decade after that, citing Congressional Budget Office estimates.READ IT ALL AT THE SITE
http://times247.com/
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Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz1rj4RML8X
Coming Apart, Coming Together Posted By Daniel Greenfield
URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/04/11/coming-apart-coming-together/
“Things fall apart, the center cannot hold,” Yeats wrote in his famous poem. In Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010”, it is America itself that has come apart and his work chronicles the undoing of a virtue-based national exceptionalism.
“Coming Apart” would not be as shocking if it were not for a political and academic establishment that is unable to speak about the problems of the working class except in terms of class warfare and racial discrimination. Murray boldly upends the formula that social problems arise from economic problems and that these can only be solved with more social welfare programs. Instead of holding the upper classes accountable for not paying enough into the system that subsidizes the welfare state, he instead holds them accountable for disrupting national values, while maintaining them communally.
While the class warfare model links social ills to an economic deprivation practiced by the rich on the poor, Murray looks instead at a values deprivation which has led to statistics such as a marriage rate of 83 percent for the white upper middle-class and only 48 percent for their working class contemporaries. This has created Two Americas divided not by wealth, as defined by John Edwards in the economic realm, but divided socially by the segregation of communities and the stratification of values.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/04/cheap_natural_gas_heralds_an_energy_revolution.html
All bets are off for the future of energy in the United States and, indeed, the world, as the price of natural gas plummets to ever-lower values — thanks to the development of technology that can access gas and liquids trapped in hitherto inaccessible shale rocks. In 2011, shale gas accounted for a quarter of U.S. natural gas production. But this seemingly bright future may depend on a court decision (expected in June 2012) and, of course, on the outcome of the November elections.
The Economics of Natural Gas
Consider the history of natural gas prices just in the last few years. In mid-2008, the spot price (at Henry Hub) reached a peak of $13 per mcf (1,000 cubic feet, with a heat value of 1 million Btu — denoted as 1 MMBTU) — having doubled since mid-2007. Since then, the price has decreased sharply, dipping to $2 in mid-March, and it now stands at $2.30. If prices decline further, natural gas will be cheaper than the average steam coal, which up until now has been the lowest-cost fuel on a heat basis.
How realistic is such a price path? Operators drilling for gas are also extracting large quantities of natural gas liquids (NGL) as well as crude oil. As pointed out by Richard Trzupek, the profit potential lies in these liquids, as natural gas becomes simply a byproduct. It reminds me of the situation in the early 1970s, 40 years ago, when “associated gas” was so cheap, only pennies per mcf, that it was flared at the well-head. The problem then was the lack of pipelines to convey the gas to consumers in major cities.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/04/arab_riots_then_and_now.html
On March 30 in Israel, Arab anti-Israel demonstrations turned violent, and the security forces had to suppress the violence with crowd control measures. Dozens of Palestinians were hurt in the West Bank and Gaza Strip while marking Land Day protests with fierce riots and clashes with IDF soldiers. Palestinian sources reported that one man was killed and thirteen others injured by IDF fire in Gaza after attempting to breach the border fence and infiltrate Israel near the Erez Crossing. This year, the Land Day observances coincided with an ambitious Palestinian plan to organize a global march to Jerusalem to protest Israel’s Judaizing of the country’s capital. Aside from the Gaza protester who was shot dead, another thirty Palestinians were wounded in the fracas.
The riots lasted for a day and then burned themselves out.
The IDF soldiers, as well as the other security personnel, were very well prepared for any possibility of extreme violence from the part of the protesters[.] … I believe that this deterrence also worked and kept them away, at least in trying to keep their amount of violence on the low side. And I also think that we also improved ourselves in a few issues since last year. (IDF Lt. Col. Avital Liebovitch, commenting on the March 30 riots)
The Muslim Brotherhood Wants Chaos in Egypt Posted By David P. Goldman
URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2012/04/10/the-muslim-brotherhood-wants-chaos-in-egypt/
From the Muslim Brotherhood’s actions of the past week–especially its decision to scuttle a desperately-needed $3 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund–it seems clear that Egypt’s dominant political organization is acting like a Leninist or Nazi vanguard revolutionary party, in what it evidently sees as a pre-revolutionary situation. The Brotherhood knows and says that Egypt’s economy is headed over a cliff, but wants to blame the crisis on the military the better to seize power
Kofi Annan’s Rendezvous with Tehran Posted By Claudia Rosett
URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/claudiarosett/kofi-annans-rendez-vous-with-tehran/
Iran welcomes a visit from the incompetent leader who does business with dictators.
The United Nations and the Arab League recently added a new layer of trouble to the agony and dangers of the Middle East by appointing as their joint special envoy to Syria none other than former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.
The charitable view: Annan’s appointment represented the triumph of amnesia over experience. During the heyday of Annan’s signature UN scandal — the Oil-for-Food program for Saddam Hussein’s Iraq — I spent a lot of time trying to figure out whether Annan was corrupt or simply incompetent and indifferent to his own failures. Given the staggering dimensions of the graft-permeated, multi-billion dollar trainwreck of the Iraq relief program for which Annan was the chief administrator, there was really no third way, apart from perhaps some mix of crookedness and ineptitude. And given that the UN’s own “independent inquiry” into the program reported finding no evidence of corrupt dealings by Annan, we must consider him officially exonerated on that front; this leaves the conclusion that he was long ago promoted far beyond his real level of competence. Indeed, the UN’s own probe reached findings that he had done a lousy job: he had failed to provide “adequate oversight” of his handpicked staff; he had failed to ensure the basic aims of the sanctions on Iraq; and his performance “fell short of the standards that the United Nations Organization should strive to maintain.”
