April 14, 2011

• Trump Sends Investigators to Hawaii for Obama’s Birth Proof
• Kobie Calls Ref “Faggot”
• CIA Propaganda Racist
• Saudis Warn of Catastrophe If Iran Starts Bushehr Reactor
• Cal Teachers Support Cop-Killer
• Iran Occupying Syria
• Navy “Ray Gun” Test A Success
• IMF Cuts US GDP Forecast Cites Feds “Unconventional Policies”
• Ireland To Release Dreadful Report on Clergy Abuse
• Summing Up for 2012
• Syria Way Station for Iranian Arms Into Gaza
• LA Jury Awards $2.1 Million for “Predatory Policing”

Real estate mogul Donald Trump, who is considering a 2012 presidential run, is sending investigators to Hawaii to pursue the issue of where President Barack Obama was born, because many Americans want proof he was indeed born in this country.

Trump is paying for researchers to find out why President Obama would have spent $2 million to not show his birth certificate.

Citibank, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, the nation’s four largest banks, were among 14 financial firms ordered to reimburse homeowners who were improperly foreclosed upon. It is unclear what the amounts will be. This order will almost certainly lead to civil lawsuit and damage awards.

After getting his 15^th technical foul of the season- one short of being banned from playing in next season’s opener Laker Kobe Bryant called referee Bennie Adams.a faggot - an oft used homosexual slur. It is not known what Adams’ sexual orientation is. The whole thing was videotaped and the NBA is investigating.

The term faggot or fagot, meaning bundle of sticks, shows up around 1300 in English. It almost certainly came from Old French, possibly going back to Greek phakelos. Since those bundles of sticks were mainly used for fires, it’s not surprising that the term came to mean burning sticks. Then there was that nasty business in medieval times where heretics were burned at the stake. Some later cites indicate heretics who repented and were spared a fiery death had to wear a picture of a faggot on their sleeve to show what might have been their fate. But no print evidence exists that homosexuals were referred to as faggots before the twentieth century, with the origin definitely in the U.S., not Britain.

The first known published use of the word faggot or fag to refer to a male homosexual appeared in 1914 in the U.S. It referred to a homosexual ball where the men were dressed in drag and called them “fagots (sissies).” Ernest Hemingway, in The Sun Also Rises (1926), included the line, “You’re a hell of a good guy, and I’m fonder of you than anybody on earth. I couldn’t tell you that in New York. It’d mean I was a faggot.” A 1921 cite says, “Androgynes [are] known as ‘fairies,’ ‘fags,’ or ‘brownies.’”

Obama’s much ballyhooed speech on the deficit at Georgetown University on Wednesday had less substance than Charlie Sheen at Radio City Music Hall. The speech was hopelessly inadequate,inaccurate.and lacked leadership.

Turns out stories in the main stream media saying Libya’s leader, Muammar Gaddafi, has engaged black mercenaries from Sahara and sub-Sahara Africa is a disinformation ploy by the CIA to stoke racist fervor among Libyans rebelling against Gaddafi.

After Western news sources “reported” that Gaddafi had hired black African mercenaries to fight against Libyan rebels, thousand of black African workers in Libya were set upon by angry mobs who believed the Western propaganda that the black workers were fighting for Gaddafi.

The role of Obama in stoking a CIA-engineered racist response by Libyan rebels has not been lost on a number of African-Americans. One leading African-American activist in Washington, DC wrote in an email: “Not demanding the accountability of a black president will garner us the same things as not holding a white President accountable - nothing.”

Western news organization reported that Libyan rebels were “hunting down” black African mercenaries but many of these were merely workers who came to Libya from their economically-depressed nations to seek employment in mainly the Libyan oil services, agricultural, and construction sectors. Ironically, a number of the Africans targeted by angry mobs spurred on by CIA and other Western intelligence planted news stories are from Kenya, the land that Obama claims as his paternal ancestral home.

Other Africans, stranded in Libya and subjected to the racial onslaught of Libyan Arabs, hailed from South Sudan, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Somalia, Ethiopia, Ghana, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Nigeria. A million and a half black African guest workers were in Libya at the outbreak of the fighting between Gaddafi and rebel forces. Only a few of the Africans were evacuated with many being forced to hide in their homes and flee without the support of their governments to squalid refugee camps in Egypt, Tunisia, and Sudan. Even dark-skinned non-African workers from Bangladesh could not escape the wrath of the Libyan rebels.

Gordian (GOR-dee-uhn) adjective: Highly intricate; extremely difficult to solve. Etymology In Greek mythology, King Gordius of Phrygia tied a knot that defied all who tried to untie it. An oracle prophesied that one who would undo this Gordian knot would rule Asia. Alexander the Great simply cut the knot with one stroke of his sword. Hence the saying, “to cut the Gordian knot”, meaning to solve a difficult problem by a simple, bold, and effective action. Earliest documented use: 1579.

Saudi and Kuwait officials have warned the US that if Iran activates its first nuclear reactor at Bushehr next month as planned, there is a good chance it will “blow up” and the entire Gulf region will suffer a nuclear disaster on  the scale of Japan’s ongoing nuclear crisis exposing millions to radiation contamination. 

This issue was urgently raised in recent Saudi-US talks - first on April 4 with US Defense Secretary Robert Gates and again Monday, April 11, with the National Security Adviser to the US President Tom Donilon.

The two high-level US official visits to Riyadh in six days attest to the fierce discord between Saudi King Abdullah and USA because of Obama’s bumbling foreign policy - not just over Iran and its nuclear activity but the entire gamut of Obama’s Middle East policy.

When he met the defense secretary, the king took Gates aside and charged that the White House ignored Saudi intelligence evidence passed to the CIA that Tehran and Hizballah were actively fomenting the unrest in Bahrain with a view to igniting parallel disturbances in the eastern Saudi oil regions among the two million Shiites living there. Abdullah complained bluntly that no matter what evidence is put before Obama, he refuses to budge from his course of so-called engagement with regard to Iran.

The king declared angrily that the lax American attitude toward Islamic Republic’s nuclear aspirations places the very existence of Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf nations in peril. The anger erupted when Obama blocked attacks on Iran’s nuclear weapons plants.

 Washington had twisted Saudi arms to refrain from challenging the Bushehr nuclear plant when preparations for its activation were completed last year, despite its harmful potential for the region  last August that similar pressure was applied to Israel.) Even the Iranians, Abdullah told Gates, were scared to switch it on out of concern for their own people.

It was the first time the Saudi monarch linked the Iranian plant with the Japanese nuclear calamity. Tuesday, April 12, Japan raised its severity to maximum seven the same as Chernobyl.

Four months ago, on Jan. 26, Moscow acted outside the rules of conventional diplomacy when Russian ambassador to NATO Dmitry Rogozin publicly demanded a NATO investigation into the effects of the Stuxnet malworm on the Bushehr reactor. He repeated a previous warning to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that “The virus attack on a Russian-built nuclear reactor in Iran could trigger a nuclear disaster on the scale of Chernobyl.”

Russian sources report that Russian concerns focused on the discovery of the unexplained entry of small pieces of metal into the cooling system. This told them that the Iranians had not managed to stop Stuxnet or its impact on the reactor’s control systems and there was no guarantee that more malfunctions capable of causing the plant to blow up had been were not in store. 

These warnings were initially heeded: Russian-Iranian preparations to active the reactor were suspended and it was emptied of nuclear fuel.

But then Friday, April 8, the fuel was reloaded the fuel. The next day, the head of Iran’s Nuclear Energy Commission Fereydoun Abbasi said: “Even before the earthquake and nuclear contamination crisis in Japan, Iran had accepted Russian experts’ proposal to revise its plant to load fuel into the core of the Bushehr power plant’s reactor.”

Iran had never before referred to the Fukushima in relation to Bushehr.

Our sources add that the Abbasi statement clearly held Moscow responsible for any potential nuclear disaster that may beset the Iranian facility. It also confirmed the Saudi claim. Riyadh has accordingly demanded that Washington act without delay and by all means possible to prevent Bushehr going on line next month according to plan.

Such US action would be diametrically opposed to the Obama administration’s Iran policy at present. However, failure to meet the Saudi demand will deepen the acute crisis in Saudi-US relations and mistrust sparked by the overthrow of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak - with effect on other related issues such as Yemen and even Pakistan. 

President Obama said he misses being anonymous. He said that in the old days, he could blend in with all the other Hawaiian Barack Obamas. — Conan

The California Federation of Teachers has adopted a resolution of support for convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal. Mumia Abu-Jamal is a former member of the Black Panthers who was found guilty of murdering a Philadelphia police officer during a routine traffic stop in 1981. Abu-Jamal was subsequently sentenced to death.

The California Federation of Teachers, argue that the cop-killers’s trial was unfair and that he is a civil rights hero.

“Mumia Abu-Jamal has for decades as a journalist fought courageously against racism and police brutality and for the human rights of all people and has taken strong stands in support of working people involved in labor struggles and in support of well-funded, quality, public education,” the resolution reads.

A new poll shows that only 19 percent of Americans strongly approve of President Obama’s performance. The other 81 percent don’t own gas stations. — Leno

Iran has deployed 10,000 elite troops in Syria to protect the regime of President Bashar Assad and has been in effective control of the country for the past week.

Iran has deployed its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Syria to bolster Syria’s defense. The Washington-based opposition group said the IRGC contingent in Syria includes 10,000 troops, with headquarters in the northern province of Homs.

“In essence, the IRGC now occupies Syria and has become its de facto ruler,” RPS spokesman Farid Ghadry said. “Syria has become the 32nd province of Iran.”

Generals in Assad’s army and security apparatuses, with emphasis on the Alawite generals, including Maher Assad, are being closely monitored by the IRGC for fear of a military coup.”

A federal judge in Pennsylvania says the popular “I (heart) boobies!” breast cancer fundraising bracelets aren’t lewd or vulgar, so it’s OK for public school students to wear them.

The Office of Naval Research (ONR) successfully tested a 15 kilowatt seaborne laser setting an inflatable boat’s outboard motors afire and destroying it near the Naval test range in the vicinity of San Nicholas island off the coast off Ventura County, California.The laser  zapped it at a range of 1 mile. ONR is toiling to build lasers many times as powerful to disable warships, aircraft and fry incoming missiles with a 2020 deployment target date.

This test was the first time the prototype was deployed and tested at sea. Heretofore all testing has been done on dry land from a rock solid, ””’’stable platform.

Northrop Grumman has a contract worth up to $98 million to build the Maritime Laser Demonstrator, that a top Navy laser-guru says proved able to cause “catastrophic failure” on a moving target at sea the first time out.

The test has made ONR eggheads giddy as they dream about their chances of deploying a Buck Rogers-like ray gun in less than a decade.

2,200 years ago Archimedes likely proposed the first “ray gun” his idea was to focus the sun’s rays using a highly polished concave mirror ad lense on marauding ships setting them afire. Ever since folks have toyed with the idea but to no  success - at least until now.

Tuesday Donald Trump raised his ante saying even if he is not the GOP nominee he will run as an independent. A three-way race ala Ross Perot would virtually assure Obama’s reelection. An unscientific internet poll by Newsmax put Trump on top of Obama and every likely GOP nominee.

The International Monetary Fund lowered its forecast for U.S. growth this year, predicting higher oil prices and the pace of job gains will restrain the recovery.

The world’s largest economy will expand 2.8 percent this year, down from the 3 percent projected in January, the IMF said today. Global gross domestic product will grow 4.4 percent in 2011, matching the previous estimate, according to the Washington-based lender’s World Economic Outlook report.

Consumer spending, the biggest part of the U.S. economy, faces headwinds from the rising cost of food and gasoline. Federal Reserve officials last month said the expansion is on “firmer footing,” lessening the need to extend a bond purchase program beyond June.

In a rare criticism the IMF said “Recovery in the labor market remains lackluster,” the IMF said in the report. “The drag on 2011 growth from oil price increases largely offsets the boost from the Federal Reserve’s unconventional policies and from stronger net exports.”

Professor Splash, as he likes to call himself, set a new world record by jumping 36.3 feet into a rubber wading pool less than 12 inches deep. He survived the harebrained stunt.

A judge cleared the way last Friday for Ireland to publish a new report into decades of Catholic Church cover-ups of child abuse - and how a Cork bishop kept crimes in his diocese secret long after the Irish church issued orders to start telling police.

Ireland’s Justice Department, which sought the legal guidance, said it planned to publish the rest of the report sometime next week, covering the cases of 18 other child-molesting priests who evaded justice in the County Cork diocese of Cloyne.

The report will add to a mountain of evidence showing how Catholic figures at the heart of Irish society abused their status to prey on children with impunity until recent years

 Ireland already has produced mammoth reports into the nature and extent of child abuse in the Dublin Archdiocese from 1975 to 2004; the Ferns diocese in the southeast County Wexford from 1962 to 2002; and a nationwide network of workhouse-style residential schools and orphanages that the Catholic Church ran and taxpayers funded until the 1980s.

 The three existing reports document how Catholic leaders knew for decades about pedophiles and sadists in their industrial schools and parishes - but kept their abuse files secret from police until the Irish public began demanding change and suing the church in the mid-1990s.

The reports all have found that, until the mid-1990s, Ireland’s police and departments of health and education habitually deferred to Catholic Church authority, while parents of victims almost always declined to speak out for fear of social ostracism.

Instead, in the case of parish priests implicated in child molestation, the church habitually transferred them to new parishes in Ireland, Britain and the United States without warning anyone in the new parish of the risk facing local children.

The Cloyne report will build on an Irish church-ordered investigation published in December 2008 that made damning findings against the then-bishop, John Magee. It found he failed to observe a 1996 church document that emphasized the need to tell police about suspected child-abuse cases.

A Chicago area grade school principal has banned homemade lunches for students at the school.  Unless they have a medical excuse, they must eat the food served in the cafeteria. Parental rights be damned the principal’s order forces all students to eat food provided by of the district’s food provider, Chartwells-Thompson. The federal government pays the district for each free or reduced-price lunch taken, and the caterer receives a set fee from the district per lunch. Some students simly do not like the cafeteria food preferring Moms more.

To all but the most leftist white Americans see Obama as a pusillanimous pushover who is silver-tongued and rubber-spined and only a third approve of what he’s doing.

Conversely his approval rating among blacks remains remarkable at  85% - albeit a new low primarily because he is not liberal enough for them. To those who most oppose him on the right, he is a Socialist, spendthrift, republic-destroyer who is unfit, unqualified and literally, by way of his “Kenyan birth,” ineligible to be president.

Obama’s best chances of winning re-election hinge on his ability to re-energize and engage two of his largest, strongest groups of supporters who have mostly avoided the negative labeling: blacks and Hispanics.

In addition to Gallup’s finding among blacks his approval rating among Hispanics dropped to 54 percent in March, matching a personal low. Obama’s approval among whites remains below 40 percent. (He won 43 percent of the white vote in 2008.) And if present trends continue, his support among minorities could be off by much more than 10 percent.

This week Obama will propose his version of budget reform.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney announced Monday he’s forming an exploratory committee, the first step in launching a presidential bid. Few give him much chance of winning the Gop nomination and fewer a chance of beating Obama.

Israel’s intelligence community has determined that Syria has become a waystation in the shipment of Iranian missiles and other weapons to Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

The Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center said Damascus, and specifically the port at Latakia, was involved in the Iranian shipment of 50 tons of weapons for Hamas, intercepted by the Israel Navy in March.

“Syria, Iran’s main partner in the radical camp, has an important role in the Iranian arms smuggling network,” the center said.

“Syria’s geopolitical position makes it an important relay station for the weapons en route to various destinations - Hizbullah in Lebanon, Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip.”

The center, staffed by former members of the Mossad and Military Intelligence, said Assad has allowed the use of his naval port in Latakia for the transfer of Iranian weapons to Hamas.

The Israeli military said the Liberian-flagged Victoria docked in Latakia, where it could have loaded the shipment of mortars and anti-ship missiles.

The Victoria was said to have contained Chinese-origin C-704 anti-ship missiles, with a range of 35 kilometers, as well as thousands of 60mm and 120mm mortars, with ranges of 2.5 kilometers and 10 kilometers, respectively.

Approximately 2,500 mortar shells were found on the Victoria, flying under a Liberian flag, which departed from the Latakia Port in Syria, and then proceeded to Mersin Port in Turkey.

Latakia,is Syrias main container port on the Meditereanian and its largest port. Iranian and Russian warships are based at Latakia. The Russians are building permanent port facilities 72 kilom,eters away at Tartus Syria’s next largest port.

“Iran invests great efforts in smuggling weapons to the terrorist organizations operating in the Gaza Strip - especially Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad - to support the reconstruction and upgrading of their military infrastructures,” the report said.

Last week Hamas agents were killed in a clandestine attack on their car in Sudan and reports now say the poison gas shells sold by Lybian rebels to Iranian agents for transshipment to Gaza were destroyed.

The oldest surgery for which evidence exists is trepanation ^](also known as trepanning, trephination, trephining or burr hole from Greek τρύπανον and τρυπανισμός), in which a hole is drilled or scraped into the skull for exposing the dura mater to treat health problems related to intracranial pressure and other diseases. Soviet excavations of the banks of the Dnieper River in the 1970s show the existence of trepanation in Mesolithic times dated to approximately 12000 BCE.

One retired and one active duty LAPD officers sued the Police Department in 2009 alleging that their captain at the city’s Westside traffic division required each motorcycle officer to write 18 tickets per shift for speeding, running red lights and other offenses that could each generate several hundred dollars for the city. An LA Jury awarded the pair $2.1 million because they were whistle blowers and retaliated against,

Recently the California Highway Patrol has been criticized  for putting pressure on patrolmen to write more tickets. Statewide the numbers of traffic citations has risen significantly as revenues from other sources have declined. At bthe same time fines and costs have been increased in many cities, counties and statewide.

So-called predatory policing is not unheard of but the jury’s award does set a new legal benchmark.

Jerkwater [ˈdʒɜːkˌwɔːtə] adj US and Canadian slang inferior and insignificant as a jerkwater town. Usually refers to a remote place without a water tower to refill locomotive boilers so railroaders had to “jerk” water in buckets from nearby ponds and streams passing it along in a bucket brigade.