www.hebronfund.org Yesterday my wife and I spent Shabbat in Jerusalem with some friends. They made Aliyah a year and a half ago and invited us to spend the day with them in the “Holy City.” After arriving at their apartment in the Kiryat Shmuel neighborhood of Jerusalem, I asked what time they leave the house […]
http://times247.com/articles/real-jobless-rate-stands-at-11-4-percent
One does not need to be a rocket scientist to grasp the fudging the BLS has been doing every month for years now in order to bring the unemployment rate lower: the BLS constantly lowers the labor force participation rate as more and more people “drop out” of the labor force for one reason or another. While there is some floating speculation that this is due to early retirement, this is completely counterfactual when one also considers the overall rise in the general civilian non institutional population. In order to back out this fudge we are redoing an analysis we did first back in August 2010, which shows what the real unemployment rate would be using a realistic labor force participation rate. To get that we used the average rate since 1980, or ever since the great moderation began. As it happens, this long-term average is 65.8% (chart 1). We then apply this participation rate to the civilian noninstitutional population to get what an “implied” labor force number is, and additionally calculate the implied unemployed using this more realistic labor force. We then show the difference between the reported and implied unemployed (chart 2). Finally, we calculate the jobless rate using this new implied data. It won’t surprise anyone that as of December, the real implied unemployment rate was 11.4% (final chart) – basically where it has been ever since 2009 – and at 2.9% delta to reported, represents the widest divergence to reported data since the early 1980s. And because we know this will be the next question, extending this lunacy, America will officially have no unemployed, when the Labor Force Participation rate hits 58.5%, which should be just before the presidential election.
SEE THE CHARTS
http://bigpeace.com/kpatton/2012/01/07/worlds-largest-missile-exercise-soon-to-take-place-with-u-s-troops-inside-israel/
IN 1991 THE PATRIOT MISSILES SENT TO ISRAEL WERE NOT SUCH A BENIGN REWARD FOR ISRAEL. IN FACT, AFTER BEING ATTACKED WITH IRAQI SCUD MISSILES ISRAEL REQUESTED THE “FRIENDLY CRAFT” CODE IN ORDER TO RESPOND DECISIVELY TO IRAQ…AND THE REQUEST WAS TURNED DOWN BY PRESIDENT BUSH, DICK CHENEY AND JAMES BAKER….TO THEIR GREAT SHAME….FEAR OF OFFENDING ARABS INHIBITED THAT ADMINISTRATION….RSK
On January 19th 1991, during the first Gulf War, the United States sent Patriot Missiles and a contingent of U.S. service members into Israel on temporary assignment. This was the least we could have done for Israel, as they vowed not to respond to Saddam’s SCUD attacks which reached deep inside Tel Aviv. Never have U.S. forces found a permanent home inside the Holy Land—until today.
Twenty years later, the United States committed to a permanent presence in Israel. According to Defense News, as of September 21st 2011, the United States deployed a high-powered, high-frequency, transportable X-band radar system to Israel along with a small contingent of support personnel. Designed to detect and track ballistic missiles soon after launch, the AN/TPY-2 Transportable Radar Surveillance/Forward Based X-band Transportable (FBX-T), its ancillary components, and some 120 EUCOM personnel are prepared to defeat any Iranian missile attack. Today, these service members make their home at Israel’s Nevatim Air Base.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/287410/left-s-so-called-empathy-mark-steyn
Lest you doubt that we’re headed for the most vicious election year in memory, consider the determined effort, within ten minutes of his triumph in Iowa, to weirdify Rick Santorum. Discussing the surging senator on Fox News, Alan Colmes mused on some of the “crazy things” he’s said and done.
Santorum has certainly said and done many crazy things, as have most members of America’s political class, but the “crazy thing” Colmes chose to focus on was Santorum’s “taking his two-hour-old baby when it died right after childbirth home,” whereupon he “played with it.” My National Review colleague Rich Lowry rightly slapped down Alan on air, and Colmes subsequently apologized, though not before Mrs. Santorum had been reduced to tears by his remarks. Undeterred, Eugene Robinson, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post columnist, doubled down on stupid and insisted that Deadbabygate demonstrated how Santorum is “not a little weird, he’s really weird.”
#ad#The short life of Gabriel Santorum would seem a curious priority for political discourse at a time when the Brokest Nation in History is hurtling toward its rendezvous with destiny. But needs must, and victory by any means necessary. In 2008, the Left gleefully mocked Sarah Palin’s live baby. It was only a matter of time before they moved on to a dead one.
http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/01/looming_destruction_will_jews_ever_learn.html
On the eve of the Second World War, Chaim Weizmann, who was to become Israel’s first president, wrote the following about the persecutions taking place in Nazi Germany:
It would require the eloquence of a Jeremiah to picture the horrors, the human anguish, of this new Destruction and of a new book of Lamentations to depict the present plight of Israel among the nations.
Several decades earlier, Max Nordau, one of the most noted European philosophers of the 19th century, and supporter of Theodore Herzl, once told the great Zionist leader and Jewish patriot, Vladimir Jabotinsky, that “the Jew learns not by way of reason, but from catastrophes. He won’t buy an umbrella merely because he sees clouds in the sky. He waits until he is drenched and catches pneumonia.”
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
The decline of the entertainment industry is all around us. Movie ticket sales have dropped sharply even with inflated numbers from IMAX and 3D movies. Network viewership has declined even more dramatically leaving big three letter networks with numbers that look more like cable. Even the music industry is a ghost of its former self.
The entertainment industry has done its best to disguise this state of affairs with glamor and big numbers. More money is invested in bigger budget projects than ever before, and some of those projects yield incredible sales numbers, but the occasional megahit can’t disguise the overall decay of the basic business model as more and more money has to be spent to draw in a declining base. It now costs more to promote a successful movie, show or performer than it takes to produce the creative content. The hundreds of millions of dollars that used to go into product development go into sales now. And the sales look good until you start taking a close look at the big picture and the bottom line. No matter how big the hits are, overall ticket sales are down, television viewership is down and there is no relief in sight.
The industry has blamed the Internet, and while technology has historically played a role in eclipsing and destabilizing technology linked entertainment business models, which movies, television and the music business certainly are, it’s an insufficient explanation. The Internet is a source of creative chaos, but the source of the entertainment industry’s woes come from inside its own gates.
http://www.examiner.com/law-enforcement-in-national/president-obama-s-myopic-view-of-the-muslim-brotherhood?render=print#print
Special thanks to Jeffrey Hochman, a former American police sergeant now living in Israel, for his invaluable help in acquiring intelligence reports regarding terrorist groups.
President Barack Obama’s view of the Muslim Brotherhood is based on his — and his advisors’ — apparent rationale that the Islamist group is reformed and much more like the American and European models of pluralistic societies.
However, experts on Islam and terrorism claim that the Muslim Brotherhood’s — and the radical Salafists — dominance of the Egyptian government, by virtue of its recent parliamentary election victories, will eventually lead to the imposition of Sharia law on Islamic Arabs and jihad against infidels.
“Nothing the Obama administration is trying to do through its aggressive overtures, including recent high-level meetings with Muslim Brotherhood officials, will change that fact. Jihad is embedded in its history, as evidenced by the violent Islamic jihadist organizations such as Hamas that it spawned. And let’s not forget that it was the Muslim Brotherhood that gave Osama bin Laden’s former deputy and current leader of al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, his start,” said attorney and World Net Daily investigative journalist Joseph Klein.
http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Belmont—Fishtown-7250
“Worst of all, a growing proportion of the people who run the institutions of our country have never known any other culture. They are the children of upper-middle-class parents, have always lived in upper-middle-class neighborhoods and gone to upper-middle-class schools. Many have never worked at a job that caused a body part to hurt at the end of the day, never had a conversation with an evangelical Christian, never seen a factory floor, never had a friend who didn’t have a college degree, never hunted or fished. They are likely to know that Garrison Keillor’s monologue on Prairie Home Companion is the source of the phrase “all of the children are above average,” but they have never walked on a prairie and never known someone well whose IQ actually was below average.”
READ IT ALL AT THE SITE
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/287424/obama-skirts-democratic-process-andrew-c-mccarthy
Obama Skirts the Democratic Process
The president has exceeded his powers, and the GOP won’t stop him.
President Obama has fulfilled a second Tom Friedman fantasy — the first being that he is, in fact, President Obama. “I have fantasized#…#that, what if we could just be China for a day,” the New York Times star columnist gushed for his ponderous fellow travelers on Meet the Press. “I mean where we could actually, you know, authorize the right solutions.”
It was May 2010, not long after Obama and a Congress dominated by Democrats had rammed through Obamacare, the most sweeping government usurpation of private industry and individual liberty in American history. Soon they’d be adding Dodd-Frank’s paralyzing intrusion into the financial sector. Yet, despite the shock and awe of hope and change, here was the Progressive Poobah, grousing that “my democracy” was failing “to work with the same authority, focus and stick-to-itiveness” as a totalitarian Communist dictatorship. After all, unburdened by our remnants of free-market competition, by the gridlock and sausage-making of two-party politics, the Chicoms produce trade and budget surpluses, state-of-the-art airports, and enviro-friendly high-speed rail. All we can manage, “on everything from the economy to environment,” Friedman complained, are “suboptimal solutions” — apparently not to be confused with the optimal Chinese menu of forced abortions, religious repression, secret police, kangaroo courts, and air you could cut with a chopstick.
#ad#Friedman is surely smiling today. So, we can assume, are other leftists, such as Peter Orszag, Obama’s former budget-overrun director, and Bev Perdue, the governor of North Carolina. Right after the midterm shellacking that swept Republicans into control of the House — a roadblock that has stymied some, but by no means all, of Obama’s transformational agenda — they said aloud what other Democrats were thinking: America’s problem is too much democracy. This week, the president solved that problem, shoving another page of the suboptimal Constitution through his made-in-China shredder.
In sum, Obama dissolved the separation of powers, the framers’ ingenious bulwark against any government branch’s seizure of supreme power — and thus the Constitution’s bulwark against tyranny. The president claims the power to appoint federal officers without the Senate’s constitutionally mandated advice and consent. He does so by claiming unilateral powers to dictate when the Senate is in session, a power the Constitution assigns to Congress, and to decree that an ongoing session is actually a recess. This sheer ukase, he says, triggers the part of the Constitution we’re keeping because he likes it — viz., the executive power to fill vacancies without any vetting by the people’s representatives.
So unemployment is down huh? Does this give President Obama something to crow about? My brilliant e-pal Jan Poller responds so well that today it’s his say…..a note to those who still support the president…
“Your beloved President and Dear Leader has now declared that he will rule by Decree. He is going to ignore Congress and ignore the constitution.
He has helped establish the Muslim Brotherhood throughout North Africa, Gaza and elsewhere. He has allowed the Muslim Brotherhood to infiltrate the U.S. government in all its branches, even into the White House. He is promoting the Taliban in Afghanistan. He is allowing the Iranians to get nukes and establish bases in Venezuela so they can threaten our country.
Do remember what is happening to Christians throughout the Muslim world. Don’t forget that Iranians hang Gay men and Gay Palestinians seek refuge in Israel so they won’t be tortured and killed.
He us decimating the military so that we won’t be able to protect ourselves.
He is ruining our economy.
And you are helping him.
Shame on you.
