http://frontpagemag.com/2012/arnold-ahlert/arming-jihadists-backfires-in-benghazi/print/ Over the weekend, the newest, and by far the most disturbing, revelations surrounding the Benghazi attack were revealed. Several sources have pointed to the possibility that a major CIA gun-running operation aimed at arming anti-Assad Al-Qaeda-affiliated forces was in danger of being exposed. If true, the information casts an even more devastating pall over […]
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/9639192/Europe-left-behind-as-shale-shock-drives-Americas-industrial-resurgence.html
Europe left behind as shale shock drives America’s industrial resurgence
The wonders of US shale gas continue to amaze. We receive fresh evidence by the day that swathes of American industry have acquired a massive and lasting advantage in energy costs over global rivals, demolishing assumptions about US economic decline.
Royal Dutch Shell is planning an ethane plant in the once-decaying steel valley of Beaver County, near Pittsburg. Dow Chemical is shutting operations in Belgium, Holland, Spain, the UK, and Japan, but pouring money into a propylene venture in Texas where natural gas prices are a fraction of world levels and likely to remain so for the life-cycle of Dow’s investments.
Some fifty new projects have been unveiled in the US petrochemical industry. A $30bn investment blitz in underway in ethelyne and fetilizer plants alone.
A study by the American Chemistry Council said the shale gas bonanza has reversed the fortunes of the chemical, plastics, aluminium, iron and steel, rubber, coated metals, and glass industries. “This was virtually unthinkable five years ago,” said the body’s president, Cal Dooley.
This is happening just as other clusters of manufacturing – machinery, electrical products, transport equipment, furniture, etc – are “re-shoring” back from from China to the US. A 16pc annual rise in Chinese wages over the last decade has changed the game. PricewaterhouseCoopers calls it the “Homecoming”.
The revival of the chemical industry is a spin-off from the greater drama of America’s energy rebound, though a very big one. As many readers will have seen, the US energy department said last week that the country will produce 11.4m barrels a day (b/d) of oil, biofuels, and liquid hydrocarbons next year, almost as much as Saudi Arabia.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203630604578070810408721722.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop The estate levy will rise to 55% in 2013 if Congress does nothing. For all the worry in Washington and Wall Street about the January tax cliff, almost no one is paying attention to the impending reincarnation of the death tax. This is one more tax increase that will live or die depending on […]
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443675404578056953261004898.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion
‘American generals were managed very differently in World War Two than they were in subsequent wars,” writes Thomas E. Ricks, the former Pentagon correspondent of the Washington Post. “During World War Two, senior American commanders were given a few months in which to succeed, be killed or wounded, or be replaced.”
Mr. Ricks rightly puts this policy down to Gen. George C. Marshall, U.S. Army chief of staff from 1939 to 1945 and one of the chief architects of the defeat of the Axis. During World War II, 16 generals were relieved of their command out of the 155 who commanded divisions, as well as no fewer than five corps commanders. By contrast, the most senior soldier to be relieved during the eight years that the United States fought in Iraq after 2003 was a colonel, Joe Dowdy. “As matters stand now,” Mr. Ricks quotes another colonel saying, “a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses his part in a war.”
It is Mr. Ricks’s contention—this is a highly contentious book—that American postwar generalship has been severely substandard not just in recent years but for much of the six decades separating Dwight Eisenhower from David Petraeus. The author writes in an engaging, informed way, but what he says amounts to a caustic assault on American postwar military leadership. He argues that, without the possibility of generals being relieved of command, “the Marshallian approach to leadership”—emphasizing a relentless expectation of success and unwillingness to accept anything less—”did not work nearly as well, as we were to see in Vietnam and Iraq.”
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/doctor-teen-mom-charged-premarital-sex-virgin-article-1.1192627 She was 29 weeks pregnant and still a virgin. That dubious diagnosis from a doctor in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, was presented at the trial of a 15-year-old girl who was accused of violating the country’s harsh Sharia laws against sex outside of marriage. The girl, identified only by the initials MM, was examined […]
http://news.yahoo.com/report-iran-drone-pictures-israeli-bases-093717698.html TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iran has images of sensitive Israeli military bases taken by a drone that was launched by Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement and downed by Israel earlier this month, a senior Iranian lawmaker claimed Monday in the latest boast from Tehran about purported advances in the capabilities of its unmanned aircraft. The announcement […]
http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/
2012.10.28 (Kaka Sahib, Pakistan) – Militants following a ‘strict version of Islam’ bomb the shrine of a saint, killing four patrons.
2012.10.28 (Kaduna, Nigeria) – Seven worshippers are murdered when a suicide car bomber plows into a Catholic church during mass.
2012.10.27 (Bawiya, Iraq) – Four children are among eight people disassembled by Sunni bombers at a playground.
2012.10.27 (Taji, Iraq) – Sunnis murder five Shia pilgrims on their way to a shrine by attaching a bomb to their bus.
2012.10.26 (Andar, Afghanistan) – Five minority Shiite civilians are pulled off a bus and executed in cold blood by religious radicals.
2012.10.26 (Maimana, Afghanistan) – A suicide bomber detonates at a rival mosque, sending at least forty-one worshippers to Allah.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-57516963/anti-film-ads-in-pakistan-feature-obama-clinton/
ISLAMABAD – Marked by the U.S. Embassy seal, advertisements condemning an anti-Islam video appeared on Pakistani television on Thursday in an apparent attempt to undercut anger against the United States, where the film was produced. Hundreds of youths, however, clashed with security officials as they tried in vain to reach the embassy in Islamabad amid anger in many countries over the film’s vulgar depiction of the Prophet Muhammad.
The advertisements appear to be an effort by the U.S. government to dampen chaos surrounding the film and undo some of the damage to America’s image in the Muslim world. Violence linked to the movie has left at least 30 people in seven countries dead, including the American ambassador to Libya. Two people have died in protests in Pakistan.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2208396/Obama-condemns-disgusting-anti-Islam-video-insists-Muslims-suffered-hands-extremism.html
President Barack Obama delivered an extensive denunciation of a ‘crude and disgusting’ anti-Islam video made in California, telling the United Nations that ‘it is time to heed the words of Gandhi’ and declaring: ‘The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.’
Obama strongly condemned the protests that spread across the Middle East and the murder of Chris Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, branding them ‘an assault on America’.
But he stated that the unrest and murderous attacks were the result of the low-budget video, which had ‘sparked outrage throughout the Muslim world’.
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/09/president-obama-falsely-claims-fast-and-furious-program-begun-under-the-previous-administration/
President Obama Falsely Claims Fast and Furious Program “Begun Under the Previous Administration”
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2012/10/23/a-pointed-argument-bayonets-and-horses/
“we also have fewer horses and bayonets.” ( marines use bayonets, and horses were critical in routing the Taliban in Afghanistan…rsk)
http://blog.heritage.org/2012/10/24/video-obama-says-sequestration-will-not-happen-really/
Obama declared that “the sequester is not something that I’ve proposed. It is something that the Congress has proposed.” This was characterized as “mistaken” by Bob Woodward, who stood behind the account of the genesis of this problem in his book The Price of Politics, in which high-ranking Obama aides brought the entire concept to Reid and then sold it to congressional Republicans. Woodward reiterated later, “What the President said is not correct.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-tells-medvedev-solution-on-missile-defense-is-unlikely-before-elections/2012/03/26/gIQASoblbS_story.html
But in an unscripted moment picked up by camera crews, the American president was more blunt: Let me get reelected first, he said; then I’ll have a better chance of making something happen.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKjPI6no5ng
Obama says success is not a result of someone working hard or being smart and that if you started your own business, you didn’t build it yourself. (July 13, 2012).
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/us/politics/04obama.text.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
CAIRO 2009
Freedom of religion is central to the ability of peoples to live together. We must always examine the ways in which we protect it. For instance, in the United States, rules on charitable giving have made it harder for Muslims to fulfill their religious obligation. That’s why I’m committed to working with American Muslims to ensure that they can fulfill zakat.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/331892/benghazi-obama-emerges-fog-war-bing-west If Obama ordered the military to “secure our personnel,” where is the order? Our ambassador to Libya was killed in our own consulate in Benghazi on the night of September 11. For the next six weeks, President Obama repeated the same talking point: The morning after the attack, he ordered increased security in our […]
http://pjmedia.com/blog/bho-whats-in-a-name/
There is a troubling hint of something very un-American about the American president. I am not alluding to the birther controversy but rather to something in the president’s character, attitudes, personal aura, and worldview. He could just as well have been born in Podunk or Dogpatch and yet an un-American flavor would still cling about him. A little while back I tried a thought experiment with an American friend still partly dazzled by the president’s populist dexterity and acclaim. I asked him to recite the names of a dozen presidents at random, ending with POTUS 43. He proceeded: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George Bush. I then asked him to pause for a moment and repeat the full name of the current occupant of the White House. He waited a moment and said: Barack Hussein Obama. A longish silence ensued and then he said, as if struck by recognition, “I see what you mean.”
Of course, there is nothing wrong with a flamboyant name and much to recommend it. A striking moniker can add a chromatic and ebullient element to the habitual, a dash of playfulness, a spirit of diversity. Nomenclature can be fun. Our athletes, after all, have practically cornered the market on appellate extravagance: Shomari Williams, Tearrius George, Ken-Yon Rambo, Marc-Olivier Brouillette, Na’Shan Goddard, LeBron James, Chip Cox, Dontrelle Inman, Jabar Westerman, Swayze Waters, Prince Amukamara, Jade Etienne — to name just a dozen. But in the context of presidential history and political expectation, “Barack Hussein Obama” remains glaringly idiosyncratic in the calendar of historically resonant names, exemplifying something scalene about the man as an American politician and leader, his conspicuous outrider status in the almanac of legacy assumptions. This is precisely what startled my interlocutor when he performed our little thought experiment. He perceived a basic asymmetry between the name and the office — in other words, to make the obvious transposition, between the man and the office.
Needless to say, liberals will seize upon the suspicion of implicit bigotry or “racism” in such a nominal exercise, but I can assure them that Obama’s lack of fit with the American presidency has nothing to do with origins or skin color, as Leftists will predictably clamor. As far as ancestry is concerned, his name could be Solomon Greenberg or Chjeng Huanyu — or Bobby Jindal — without being negatively emblematic or disturbing in the slightest. When it comes to pigmentation, the same applies. “Obama is sui generis in American presidents,” writes Jean Kaufman, “and I’m not referring to the fact that he’s the first black president.” Martin Luther King Jr. is undoubtedly a fine name for a president of the United States. Thomas Sowell fits perfectly. Herman Cain is good, too. More to the point, all would have likely made decent chief executives.
