• Turkey Is Unilaterally Reshuffling Middle East Strategy
• China, Germans, French And Most Others Mad At U. S. QE Ploy
• Dr. Doom Says U. S. Banks Risk Insolvency
• EU Pushing Obama Away From Israel and To Arabs.
• Poll: Hillary and Patraeus Both Beat Obama
• Olberman Back After Two Show Suspension
• Eleven, Eleven, Eleven Some Details.
• Marathon: Legend and History
• World Bank Says Go Back to Gold Standard
• Issa Promises Massive Investigations
• Obama’s Last Ditch Get Out The Vote Worked

It is a hoax if you receive an email citing Obama’s statement allegedly made on Sunday’s 07 Sept. 2008  ”Meet the Press”  when then Senator Obama was supposedly asked to explain his stance on the American flag and national anthem and was abjectly hostile and absurdly critical. Obama was not on that show that day and made no such comments in any case.

It is true that Obama was later photographed during a rendition of the national anthem standing in front of an American flag without his hand over his heart while others including Hilary Clinton stood at attention with hands over their hearts.

Check out http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/stance.asp

Turkey, NATO’s sole Muslim-majority member, is rejecting the proposed NATO anti-ballistic missile shield saying the project may deal a blow to ties with its neighbors Iran and Russia, which have notably improved in recent years.

This is seen as a further blow to what had been a strengthening Middle East strategy. Turkey while rejecting ties with Israel has been strengthening relations with Iran and Russia upsetting a carefully balancing in the region.

Iran is becoming increasingly brazen and aggressive exploiting what it and others see as a confused and weak Obama and his Rodney King-like policy.

Incoming Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah plans to lead the charge for a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, with the goal of implementing one within a year.

The United States and China are on a collision course as this week’s gathering of leaders of the G20 the most important economic powers threatens to devolve into a meaningless charade amid pressure against a U.S. scheme to cure financial ills by printing ever-more “funny” money.

China, Germany, Brazil and France, and about all the world’s financial wizards are up in arms about the decision of the U.S. Federal Reserve to print worthless dollars to buy up $600 billion in Treasury bonds in a move that may make the U.S. the “odd country” out in the Group of 20 (G-20), when they meet in Seoul on Thursday and Friday.

 The term for this move is quantitative easing (QE), and the latest round, on top of the earlier purchase of $1.7 trillion, is dubbed QE2, but it won’t be anything like a cruise on the old QEII, the luxury liner Queen Elizabeth II of a bygone era.

“One of the biggest concerns with this round of quantitative easing is that it will make the already weak U.S. dollar even weaker,” said the Bedford Report in an analysis of the market impact.

Lawrence Summers, President Barack Obama’s top economic adviser, danced around the issue on Tuesday in a teleconference with the Asia Society’s Korea Center in which he said, enigmatically: “You are going to see continuing discussion at the G-20,” but he acknowledged “the imbalances will not be fixed”.

Nor was he at all optimistic about the G-20 reaching some semblance of consensus that might paper over the fissures, more like chasms, of disagreement. All he would say, in the most polite circumlocution, was: “I am confident we will reach a successful outcome at the summit.”

Fed chairman Ben Bernanke is doing some fancy talking of his own to allay concerns, saying that buying up all those bonds, which calls for spewing out tons of plain old $100 bills, is “just monetary policy” by another means.

What else can you do, he pleads, with the high number of people out of work in the U.S., the rate of inflation below expectations and no more room for slashing short-term interest rates. The phenomenon of “a large amount of slack and declining inflation“, he said, was “a signal that more should be done” and “the motivation” for the move.

As far as most of the leaders converging in Seoul for the G-20 are concerned, however, Bernanke is playing an old-fashioned game of voodoo economics, and they see the Fed’s sudden move as carefully timed to undercut arguments for other G-20 nations not to act decisively in revaluing their own inflated currencies.

The Fed’s grandstand play, they predict, will either backfire or have little impact in redressing what all acknowledge are gross “imbalances” in a system in which China and Germany are reaping fortunes in trade surpluses while the U.S. and others have huge deficits.

The U.S. gambit, if nothing else, provides more ammunition for all sides in what Brazil’s Finance Minister Guido Mantega was the first to call “currency wars” for the pushing-and-pulling over currency revaluation.

Until the Fed’s move last week, Mantega was the most outspoken among the ministers of the BRICs - Brazil, Russia, India and China - a loose assortment of countries that investors and economists like to describe as “new emerging markets” covering large geographical areas, large populations and growing industries.

He did not hesitate to blame the U.S. for adding to global economic distress by printing ever-more money while failing to bring its trillion-dollar budget deficit under control. “For me, most destabilizing for the global exchange is the devaluation of the dollar,” he has said,

Since the Fed’s latest move, leaders and their financial gurus from a host of countries are joining the chorus, loudly publicizing views that they had been reluctant to express so openly for fear of upsetting the G-20.

Who would have imagined, for instance, that German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble would have denounced U.S. fiscal policy as “clueless” or that his South African counterpart Pravin Gordhan would have stated so frankly that the impact was to “undermine the spirit of multilateral cooperation that G-20 leaders have fought so hard to maintain during the current crisis.”

The Chinese, the U.S. public enemy number one on currency issues due to its to refusal to cooperate on drastically revaluing the yuan, were not quite so outspoken, but if anything more forbidding in their staunch defense of their own policies. Why, asked Vice Foreign Minister Cui Tiankai, does the U.S. hold China responsible for its own failure to hold down its budget, and why does the U.S. persist in demanding that China increase the value of the yuan while simultaneously devaluing the dollar?

With all the annoyance over U.S. monetary policy, one has to wonder what Obama is going to tell China’s President Hu Jintao when they meet at the opening session on Thursday in the vast Convention and Exhibition Center and then dine that evening at the National Museum. The concern is not that they’ll shout at one another, or even display overt coolness. Rather, they’re likely to talk in the same bland generalities with which the G-20 finance ministers and central bank governors covered their differences last month in the ancient Silla kingdom capital of Gyeongju, in southeast Korea.

Obama is absolutely sure to say, in effect, look guys, the whole world is going to have a much healthier economy if the U.S. economy improves. And to do that, he’ll say, we need to cut down our trillion-dollar trade deficit and you guys gotta set your currencies at their real values and stop dumping all that low-priced stuff on us.

And Hu and all the others are going to nod politely while going off on their own double talk about their sincere desire to reduce imbalances and, while they’re at it, elevate all those poor nations that the G-20 is making a major conference topic under the rubric, “development”.

Trouble is, the Fed’s move is going to seem to some of those leaders, including Hu, as almost a betrayal of Gyeongju, where U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner got off to a bad start by trying to talk the other G-20 ministers into confining their surpluses to 4 percent of their current account surpluses.

China and the rest shot down that idea so fast at Gyeongju that Geithner was left sputtering he didn’t quite mean that, just that everyone should be good. The final statement papered over everything with ritualistic cant about the evils of protectionism, the need for price stability and, if nothing else, progress toward “exchange rate systems that reflect underlying economic fundamentals and refrain from competitive devaluation of currencies.”

That kind of mumbo-jumbo would appear ideally suited as a model for the “action statement” that should emerge from the G-20 on Friday. Geithner himself, after the gathering of Pacific-rim finance ministers at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation group confab in Kyoto, was talking up that old catchall, “flexibility”.

Targets, said Geithner, were “not something you can reduce easily to a single number.” Indeed, lest any of them hark back to Gyeongju, he added for good measure that targets were “not desirable, necessary and it’s not likely at this stage”, he said. Nor did he see “re-emergence of the type of excess imbalances on the trade side, either surpluses or deficits that could threaten future financial stability”.

But what if the meetings surrounding the summit get heated, what if the “sherpas”, the special word for the senior finance people from each country who are spending much of the week frantically trying to iron out differences, are so taken aback by the latest U.S. solution to its problems that they really get stuck on coming up with a fresh formula?

With G-20 countries at severe odds on the dominant issue of U.S.-led demands, South Korea basks in the spotlight of center stage. Jang Ha-Sung, dean of the business school at Korea University, sees “China, India and Korea together as the largest portion of the emerging market countries.”

When it comes to the issues that never go away, those of imbalances in currency, trade and income, Jang makes an extraordinary prediction that may not sit well with Geithner’s incessant demands for the revaluation of China’s currency.

“My sense is the Chinese yuan will be one of the world’s top currencies,”  he says. “The Chinese yuan will be stronger than the Japanese yen or even the euro or the dollar, and the Chinese will play a key role in global recovery.”

99 of 150 Texas legislators are Republican as are two-thirds of its Senators and so is its Governor. Its pro-business-jobs friendly positions makes it America’s foremost destination.

 Nouriel Roubini, the star economist whose gloomy forecasts have earned him the nickname of Dr. Doom, is at it again and he’s not alone.

Laurie Goodman, senior managing director at Amherst Securities, who says one in five distressed homeowners in the U.S. faces, or may face, foreclosure, Housing Wire reports.

She says 11.5 million home loans are non-performing or highly distressed at present.

And Roubini says that spells trouble. “Amherst Securities Goodman estimates that 11.5 million households could default on their mortgages, not the 4 million priced in by markets,”

Last week, Roubini forecast failure for the Federal Reserve’s latest easing effort. “QE2 will be followed by QE3 and QE4, as QE2 will fail to revive the real economy and to prevent deflationary pressures,” he tweeted.

Roubini isn’t the only one worried about the home market. “We face a huge problem in housing,” Mortimer Zuckerman, chief executive officer of Boston Properties, tells Bloomberg. Prices are still going down, and about 11 million mortgages under water, he points out.

After Obama delayed their shipment for nearly 2-years the Israel Air Force has taken delivery of its first shipment of GBU-39 Small Diameter Bombs from the U. S. One thousand of the 250 pound bombs were approved in 2008, they are designed for urban use. It isn’t known how many Israel received.

Obama’s policy toward Israel has been increasingly influenced by the hostility of the European Union  a report said.

A report by a leading analyst said the EU has become the most influential lobby in the United States regarding Israel. Steven Rosen, a director at the Middle East Forum, said EU leaders were pushing Obama away from Israel and toward the Arab world.

“European leaders are the most effective external force urging the U.S. government to move away from Israel and closer to the Arabs,” the report, titled “The Arab Lobby: The European Component,” said.

Rosen, a former senior lobbyist with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, said Arab countries have used Europe to pressure Washington to weaken the U.S. relationship with Israel. He said successive U.S. administrations have regarded Europe as vital for the world economy, NATO as well as American dominance in the Middle East.

“Europe is not hostile to Israel on every issue, and not every European intervention with U.S. officials is meant to move U.S. policy in the Arab direction,” the report, published in the Middle East Quarterly,” said. “But, on the whole, the Arab road to Washington runs through Paris, London, and Berlin.”

Rosen said the Europeans have been far more effective than the Arab-American lobby. The report also played down the so-called “petrodollar lobby,” led by Saudi Arabia, in reducing U.S. policy toward Israel.

“The strongest external force pressuring the U.S. government to distance itself from Israel is not the Arab-American organizations, the Arab embassies

, the oil companies, or the petrodollar lobby,” the report said. “Rather, it is the Europeans, especially the British, French, and Germans, that are the most influential Arab lobby to the U.S. government. The Arabs consider Europe to be the soft underbelly of the U.S. alliance with Israel and the best way to drive a wedge between the two historic allies.”

Rosen said Britain, France and Germany wield the greatest influence over Washington’s foreign policy establishment. They said the leaders of the three EU states, which have threatened to embark on an independent policy, have easier access to the president and his senior aides than either Arabs or Israelis.

The EU states were said to have been pressing Washington to engage with Hamas and Hizbullah, force Israeli concessions to the PA and oppose Jewish construction in the West Bank and most of Jerusalem. The report said the EU has been working intensively behind the scenes to pressure Israel to establish a Palestinian state in the West Bank.

“One of the things the Europeans want from Washington is intensified pressure on Jerusalem to make concessions in peace negotiations, in order to get an agreement with the Palestinians,” the report said. “Europeans like the idea of deadlines, international conferences, verbal and economic pressure on Israel, and other devices, to dislodge the Israeli government from what they tend to see as its ‘intransigence.’”

In 1991, the report said, then-British Prime Minister John Major scuttled an Israeli-U.S. deal that would have enabled $10 billion worth of American loan guarantees to the Jewish state. Major was said to have changed the mind of President George Bush, who then asked Congress to delay the loan guarantees.

“Assistant secretaries, office directors, and senior advisers give special weight to the opinions of their French, German, and British counterparts and spend more time with them than they do with the Arabs,” the report said. “These Europeans also have easy access to members of Congress and their senior staffs.”  

It looks like John Boehner will be the new speaker of the House. He is the son of a bartender, one of 12 children who grew up in a two-room home with just one bathroom. He worked his way through school and became the first person in his family to graduate from college. Then, sadly, he fell in with the wrong crowd and wound up in Congress. - Leno

Newsmax conducted a nationwide survey on November 3-4 immediately after the midterm election that Obama calls a “shellacking” to find out how several well-known political and “dark-horse” celebrity figures, would fare if they ran against Obama for the White House.

The most remarkable findings were that overall U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus, the head of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, received 52 percent of the votes to Obama’s 48 percent, the best head-to-head showing of any potential candidate in the Newsmax survey with the exception of Hillary Clinton, who received the widest margin over Obama 60 to 40%.

The results showing a figure with no political experience outpolling a sitting president suggest that Americans lack confidence in Obama on national security and the war on terror, and that he could be vulnerable to a military figure in 2012. Americans may also like the idea of a nonpartisan “get things done” general could be good for the nation as it faces growing economic problems.

Men favored Petraeus over Obama by a wider margin, 59 percent to 41 percent.

Petraeus, who holds a Ph.D. in international relations, also outpolled Obama among the younger age groups, which previously had been considered solid Obama territory. Voters 18 to 54 years of age gave Petraeus 53 percent, and those 35 to 49 favored the general with 54 percent.

Republicans overwhelmingly supported Petraeus, giving him 83 percent of the vote, as did conservatives (86 percent). Significantly, independents also backed the general, with 54 percent.

Obama polled strongest among blacks (75 percent) and liberals (82 percent).

Clinton trounces Obama in almost every sector including:

• 60 percent of women and 59 percent of men chose her over him;
• Older voters were more likely to vote for Clinton - 67 percent of respondents 65 and older and 60 percent of those 50 to 64 chose Clinton.
• But even among the youngest age group that was considered solid Obama territory, 18- to 34-year-olds, a majority of 54 percent opted for Clinton.

Clinton also polled strongly among Hispanic voters (55 percent), independents (60 percent), Republicans (74 percent) and conservatives (82 percent).

Obama polled strongest among blacks (65 percent) and liberals (55 percent).

Gates, Buffett, and Trump also beat Obama in 2012 race for White House.

Clinton has said she will not be a candidate in 2012 or 2016. She is 64-years old. General Patraeus, who is 58-years old, has said he has no political plans.

Parsimonious (par-si-MO-nee-uhs) adjective: Excessively sparing or frugal.  Etymology  from Middle English parcimony, from Latin parsimonia, from parcere (to spare). First recorded use: 1598.

MSNBC President Phil Griffin’s “indefinite” suspension without pay of Keith Olberman was ended after only two missed shows - Friday and Monday. Olberman was suspended for breaking NBC News rules against political contributions or other things casting doubt on a reporter’s impartiality. Olberman is paid $7 million a year.

The whole thing was a charade inasmuch as Olberman was never a paragon of unbiased reporting or for that matter even pretending that he was ever so.

To the contrary Olberman openly and often bitterly spews against conservatives and his vitriol has been particularly nasty against President George W. Bush. Skeptics say the brouhaha was little more that a weekend long promotion to increase MSNBC’s flagging market share.

Two hundred and thirty-five years ago yesterday Captain Samuel Nicholas (1744-1790) formed two battalions of Continental Marines on 10 November 1775 in Philadelphia as naval infantry. Today there are about 203,000 active duty Marines and 40,000 reservists.

Sailors are fond of pointing out the Marine’s are a department of the Navy to which Marines reply, “That’s correct. We’re the men’s department.”

The is Veteran’s Day - originally Armistice Day until President Eisenhower designated the day to honor all of Americans who died in any of the nation’s wars.

The armistice between the Allies and Germany was signed 92-years ago in a railway carriage in Compiègne Forest shortly after 5AM on 11 November 1918, and set 11 AM Paris time that day as the end of fighting in the First World War on the Western Front.

The news was quickly given to the armies during the morning of 11 November, but even after hearing that the armistice was due to start at 11:00, intense fighting continued right until the last minute. Many artillery units continued to fire if only to avoid having to haul away spare ammunition.

In the final 24-hours there were 10,944 casualties of which 2,738 men died.

Augustin Trébuchon was the last Frenchman to die when he was shot on his way to tell fellow soldiers that hot soup would be served after the 11AM ceasefire. He was killed at 10:45 am. The last British soldier to die, George Edwin Ellison of the 5th Royal Irish Lancers, was killed earlier that morning at around 9:30 am while scouting on the outskirts of Mons, Belgium. The final Canadian, and Commonwealth, soldier to die, Private George Lawrence Price, was killed just two minutes before the armistice to the north of Mons at 10:58 am, to be recognized as one of the last killed with a monument to his name. And finally, American Henry Gunther is generally recognized as the last soldier killed in action in World War I. He was killed 60 seconds before the armistice came into force while charging astonished German troops who were aware the Armistice was nearly upon them.

The last reported German casualty occurred after the 11 a.m. armistice. A Lieutenant Tomas, in the Meuse-Argonne sector, went to inform approaching American soldiers that he and his men would be vacating houses that they had been using as billets. However, he was shot by soldiers who had not been told about the ceasefire.

It took months more before a final treaty could be negotiated. Many believe a result of its punishments and reparation payments exacted on Germany resulted in the rise of Adolf Hitler and World War II.

Today is funny man Jonathan Winters’ 85^th birthday. Mr. Winters is a proud US Marine Corp veteran.

Last weekend was the New York marathon. Popular legend says marathon races  commemorate  the  run  of  the  soldier Pheidippides  from a battlefield near Marathon, Greece, to Athens in 490 B.C., bringing news of a Greek victory over the  Persians. Legend is Pheidippides shouted “Nike” ( Victory ) and collapsed and died at the end of his historic run, thereby setting a  precedent  for  dramatic  conclusions  to  the marathon.

When the Olympic games were inaugurated in 1896  in  Greece, the  legend  of  Pheidippides was revived by a 24.85 mile (40,000 meters) run from Marathon Bridge to Olympic  stadium  in  Athens.

The facts according to Herodotus (464BC-430BC) are as follows: The Athenian generals sent Pheidippides, a professional runner, to Sparta to ask the Spartans to help fight the Persian army, who had arrived by ship at Marathon. Pheidippides completed the 145 mile journey and arrived in Sparta the day after he left Athens. He delivered the Generals’ request, then returned to Athens with the Spartan’s reply - which was that due to observances they could not leave Sparta until the full moon. Upon receiving this news the generals decided to attack the Persians anyway, the result being an Athenian victory against seemingly overwhelming odds.

Having been beaten in the field, the Persians returned to their ships and set sail for Athens - to attack it while undefended. However the Athenians marched the 25 miles overland and succeeded in reaching Athens before the ships, at which the Persians thought better of their plan and beat a retreat by sea.

 Regardless of the details what marathon has come to represent over these now nearly two and a half thousand years continues to be worthy.

U. S. News and World Report is ending as a print magazine and will now be only online. In 2008 it dropped back to a monthly periodical from a bi-weekly format. It was originally a weekly magazine.

United States News was founded in 1933, and World Report in 1946. The two magazines initially covered national and international news separately, and merged into U.S. News & World Report in 1948 and subsequently the magazine was sold to his employees. In 1984, it was purchased by Mortimer Zuckerman, who is also the owner of the New York Daily News. Declining subscribers and falling advertising revenue sealed its fate.

By the way, in case you missed it, the faltering NEWSWEEK recently sold for ONE DOLLAR.

Leading economies should consider adopting a modified global gold standard to guide currency rates, World Bank President Robert Zoellick said on Monday in a surprise proposal before a potentially acrimonious G-20 summit this week in South Korea.

Writing in the Financial Times, Zoellick called for a “Bretton Woods II” system of floating currencies as a successor to the Bretton Woods fixed-exchange rate regime that broke down in the early 1970s.

The former U.S. trade representative, who served in several Republican administrations, said such a move “is likely to need to involve the dollar, the euro, the yen, the pound and (a yuan) that move towards internationalization and then an open capital account.

“The system should also consider employing gold as an international reference point of market expectations about inflation, deflation and future currency values,” he added.

Analysts were cautious. “Going forward that would be something that we could look towards, but it’s not going to happen within a short period of time,” said Ong Yi Ling, analyst at Phillip Futures in Singapore, adding that gold prices barely reacted to the comments.

Sarah Palin’s daughter Bristol, the ‘Dancing With the Stars’ contestant, says she “forgot” to vote in last week’s midterm election.

 Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Cal., the likely new chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform plans to broaden his own committee’s agenda, including hundreds of hearings and investigations of the bank bailout, the fiscal stimulus package and possibly healthcare reform, Politico reports.

The conservative Republican says he wants each of his seven subcommittees to hold “one or two hearings each week. I want seven hearings a week, times 40 weeks.”

Issa also plans to name aggressive conservative Reps. Jason Chaffetz of Utah, Patrick McHenry of North Carolina and Jim Jordan of Ohio to chair some of his subcommittees. And he intends to refer some inquiries to other committees, thereby enlisting other chairmen in the cause too.

The White House is bracing for literally hundreds of GOP-led probes, hearings, and subpoenas into allegations of fraud, waste, and possible wrongdoing in the Obama administration.

An inspector general says the White House edited a report about the administration’s moratorium on offshore oil drilling to make it appear that scientists and experts supported the idea of a six-month ban on new drilling which they did NOT.

Finally Obama’s last-ditch attempt to turn out his voter base worked — and changed the 2010 election from a tsunami of epic proportions into a mere catastrophe for the Democrats says Dick Morris.
 
John Zogby’s post-election polling reveals that voters who made up their minds about how to vote within the last week voted Democrat by 57-31 while those who made up their minds earlier backed the Republican candidate, 53-44. Zogby’s data indicated that it made no difference whether the voter decided for whom to vote two or three weeks before the election or more than a month before. Both groups backed Republicans by 10 points. But those who decided in the voting booth or in the week immediately before voting backed the Democrat by large margins.

Those voters were pulled from Obama’s 2008 base young, single and lower income. Blacks cast only 10 percent of the vote and Latinos only 8 percent in the 2010 elections and both groups voted overwhelmingly Democrat.

In 2008, they cast 13 and 10 percent, respectively. Married men voted Republican by 60-35. Married women followed suit by 58-40.  Unmarried men voted Democrat by 50-42. Unmarried women voted Democrat by 61-34. In a surprise union members broke evenly.

President Obama went to India, South Korea, then Japan. He’s going to keep traveling until he finds his birth certificate. - Letterman