RWC Unfiltered 7-7-2011

• Bombs Inside Bodies Grim New Threat.
• Pro-Palestine, anti-Israel Flotilla Plot Ends With Whimper
• A 148 Year-old American Heroine’s Little Known Story
• Fed up Saudis Warn of Gulf Nuke Arms Race
• Stimulus Stupidity The Great Failure
• Obama’s Nonsensical Energy Policy
• Obama Interfering In Texas Execution of Rapist - Murderer.
• Bill Clinton Calls For Lowering Taxes on Business
• 76-year -old Army Doc Still Serving In Afghanistan
• Read “Road to Serfdom’ In Light of Obama’s Bankrupting Economics
• With Spread Cheating by Atlanta Teachers And Principals

The extent to which Muslim extremist are willing to go to kill non-believers and advance their religious agenda is underscored in new revelations that explosives are being implanted inside the bodies of suicide bombers. The “inventor” is said to be a Saudi religious zealot who is known to have killed his own brother in an attempt on the life of a Saudi official. The bomb exploded prematurely blowing his brother to smithereens to gain nothing.

There is information that breast implants can be used as well as packages of explosives surgically implanted inside bombers bodies and detonated by cellular phone of injecting a chemical initiator.

Security experts are scrambling for way to detect such devices. A week ago TSA guards were slammed for strip searching a baby’s diaper and a 90-year-old cancer sufferers diaper the wheelchair bound woman was wearing.

A Florida jury found Casey Anthony not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in the death of her two-year old daughter. To me the issue turned on an inept prosecution cornered with an flaccid argument that overreached.  Today she was sentenced to 4-1 year prison terms and a $1,000 fine for each conviction of oying to a police officer; sentences to be served consecutively. It is the maximum the judge could impose. She could be released in a matter of days or weeks.

Pro Palestinian, anti-Israel activists seeking to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza with a flotilla of “aid” ships appeared close to defeat on Tuesday as a self-imposed deadline expired and many of the international activists due to sail began to return home.

Although some vowed to continue with their quest, no new date has been set for departure of the flotilla, which was supposed to be taking medicines, food, gifts and building materials to Gaza.

An Israeli law centre claimed credit for ending the flotilla’s ambitions.

Just over a year after nine people were killed when Israeli marines stormed a pro-Palestinian flotilla, authorities last week banned ships destined for Gaza from leaving Greek ports, aiming to stop the latest flotilla “for their safety”.

The Greeks have intercepted several of the flotilla’s 10 ships as they tried to leave port in recent days, while others were forced to withdraw from the voyage due to damage which passengers blamed on Israeli sabotage.

One small French craft did manage to evade the Greek coastguard and reach international waters on Tuesday, but those on board decided not to try for Gazan waters alone and have now turned back. Meanwhile, the American captain of The Audacity of Hope, a flotilla vessel which was forced back to shore after attempting to break free on Friday, was released from custody on Tuesday. John Klusmire had been arrested on charges of setting sail without permission and endangering passengers, prompting a hunger strike from activists on board. Other protests by flotilla campaigners in Athens - including the occupation of the Spanish embassy - are ongoing.

Few seem to care what the collection of nitwits are up to.

Ravel (RAV-uhl) verb tr. intr.:1. To fray or to become disjoined; to untangle. 2. To entangle or to become tangled. Etymology from Middle Dutch ravelen (to fray out), from ravel (loose thread). Earliest documented use: before 1540.

On July, 4,1863 a poor single mother herself born of an African mother and Irish father on St, Valentine’s Day, 1813 -Lydia Hamilton Smith embarked on a selfless heroic mission. Her husband had died years before leaving her to raise their children alone.

Without being asked and using a rented horse and wagon  she travelled to nearby Gettysburg and began caring for the thousands of wounded abandoned there by both sides after the battle on July 1-3. They now lay in the soaking rains and then scorching sun on the battlefield at Gettysburg. Without discrimination she tended those left to die with just four dozen medical personnel to help and only half of those qualified surgeons.

She stopped at local farms begging food and clothing to aid those as she found them,. When the donations dried up, she began spending her own very modest savings accumulated pennies at a time over years of work. Each day, with her wagon heaped high, she turned toward the hospitals; and when she reached them, weary from miles of travel, she delivered those she’d saved and distributed the articles she had brought.

Of the 165,000 combatants involved there were 45 to 50,000 killed and wounded including only one civilian Miss Jenny Wade killed when a bullet pierced the door of her aunt’s house in Gettysburg, Jenny had gone there during the battle to be sure her aunt was OK.

Learning of Lydia’s heroic efforts her employer Congressman Stevens of nearby Lancaster, Pa. who died in 1868 left her $5,000 in his will. She purchased Steven’s home in Lancaster and a large boarding house across from the prestigious Willard Hotel in Washington, DC. She spent most of her time operating the establishment and earned a reputation as an astute businesswoman, but she returned often to Lancaster. Lydia Smith died on Valentine’s Day 1884 in Washington, D.C., and was buried in the cemetery of St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Lancaster, where she had long been a member.

Certain days that people are born or die on are symbolic. To die on one’s birthday is believed by some to be a gift from God, telling the whole world that God was pleased with the efforts of that person. It should be noticed that Lydia died on her birthday… Yes, on a pagan holiday, but nonetheless still a sign from God that maybe he was pleased with this modest, unselfish, and anonymous woman.

It was at the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery on November 19, 1863 on the occasion of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address that union bodies buried where they fell began to be disinterred and reburied in the design we know today that Lincoln approved. Laborers were paid $1.69 per Union body found,  recovered, and reburied. Confederates were simplied reburied and ignored  Many of the Confederate graves sites were recorded. Much later . Confederate dead were disinterred and sent home if that could be determined,

Rev. Bill with extensive experience in Latin America says, I should add a very impressive incident in my life.  At the Colegio Latinoamericano in Cartagena, Colombia, after dinner one evening I sat down in the breezeway with the young leader of a Latin America Mission medical caravan that was going out into the swampy, primitive environment of the Chocó, where Colombia connects with Panama.  He told me a lot of people had been warning him and his crew that any day they were going to be ambushed by M19 guerrillas and cut to ribbons by AK47s.

 I said, “Good heavens, man!  You’re a young man with a family.  What are you going to do about it?”  I mean, at least soldiers who go into tough situations like that have weapons.

 He said with a shrug, “We’re going to keep going out.  The Lord wants us to, and we’re needed.”

I spoke to a Mennonite male nurse who worked in roughly the same area.  He said there were something like 400,000 people to one doctor in the area.  He said it was touching to see that some of the people were actually able to keep from getting sick until he got to them.

 As it turned out, the M19 leadership in that area was made up largely of disgruntled university graduates whose parents had sacrificed along with the students to get them through, only to learn that there were no jobs available.  The bad news was that they had studied guerrilla tactics and were more skillful fighters than the general run.  The good news is that they also knew it was counterproductive to kill off the few people who were self-sacrificing helping the dispossessed.  So they never did attack the caravans.

Tomorrow Iran, or a surrogate, will announce that Iran has constructed a nuclear warhead prototype. Tehran has now crossed every red line set by the West against its acquiring nuclear arms by furtively exploiting the months of furious Arab unrest for high speed, undisturbed progress. Western and Israeli intelligence are now waking up to some unpleasant surprises. It is no coincidence that Iran has been beavering away and now successfully tested a ballistic missile capable of delivering a nuclear warhead.

The revelation will send the entire Middle Easy clawing up its walls like a scalded cat.  In addition to creating a crisis for Obama who pooh-poohed that Iran could do this in the foreseeable future as if America and the world needed more bad news CAUSED by his Rodney King foreign policy.

When the Obama administration releases a report on the Friday before a long weekend, it’s clearly not trying to draw attention to the report’s contents. Sure enough, the “Seventh Quarterly Report” on the economic impact of the “stimulus,” released on Friday, July 1, provides further evidence that President Obama’s economic “stimulus” did very little, if anything, to stimulate the economy, and a whole lot to stimulate the debt.

The report was written by the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors, a group of three economists who were all handpicked by Obama, and it chronicles the alleged success of the “stimulus” in adding or saving jobs. The council reports that, using “mainstream estimates of economic multipliers for the effects of fiscal stimulus” (which it describes as a “natural way to estimate the effects of” the legislation), the “stimulus” has added or saved just under 2.4 million jobs - whether private or public - at a cost (to date) of $666 billion. That’s a cost to taxpayers of $278,000 per job.

Not even the most ardent among the liberal mainstream media can cover up such abject a failure so they ignored it. But, even such manipulation can disguise the failure.

As predicted weeks ago Saudi Arabia has now warned NATO and everyone one else of a nuclear arms race in the Gulf. A senior Saudi prince believed sent by King Abdullah has told NATO that Riyad would not lag behind Iran in any nuclear weapons race. Prince Turki Al Faisal told a NATO conference in June that an Iranian nuclear weapons buildup would prompt a similar effort by Saudi Arabia.

“This would compel Saudi Arabia to pursue policies which could lead to untold and possibly dramatic consequences,” Turki was quoted as saying. In 2008, the Saudi king warned the United States that Riyad would embark on a nuclear weapons effort unless Iran’s project was halted. The warning, reported in a U.S. State Department cable, was never denied by the Saudi leadership.

The remarks, first reported by Britain’s Guardian daily, marked the latest Saudi warning that it was preparing a nuclear weapons program. Over the last 18 months, Riyad has signed nuclear cooperation accords with Western nations as well as China and Russia.

Turki was said to represent the Saudi leadership, particularly the king and Deputy Prime Minister Prince Nayef. Over the last decade, Turki has served as Saudi intelligence chief as well as Riyad’s ambassador to the United States.

“We cannot live in a situation where Iran has nuclear weapons and we don’t,” Turki, according to a transcript of the NATO conference in a British air force base, said. “It’s as simple as that. If Iran develops a nuclear weapon, that will be unacceptable to us and we will have to follow suit.”

Turki warned NATO that Iran was expanding its influence throughout the Gulf and the rest of the Middle East. The prince urged the Western alliance to confront Iran, which he termed a “paper tiger with steel claws.”

“Iran is very sensitive about other countries meddling in its affairs,” Turki was quoted as saying. “But it should treat others like it expects to be treated. The kingdom expects Iran to practice what it preaches.”

The Saudis financed Pakistan’s nuclear weapons development reserving two warheads for itself which are now reported to be sitting near Saudi aircrafts and crews ready to be shipped to the Saudi military. The Saudis have openly accused Obama of perfidy (Deceitfulness; untrustworthiness) in his mishandling of Iran. The Saudis are reportedly alarmed and disturbed by the Obama White House’s reapparoachment scheme with Iran saying it amounts to an American surrender to the radical mullahs. Pakistan is reported to have 100 nuclear weapons.

It is likely others in the region will now obtains nuclear warheads to defend themselves and hopefully deter Iran’s Mullahs from exploiting its nuclear weapons directly or by arming extremists

A new report on Obama’s so-called “economic stimulus” spending says each new job created cost taxpayers an astonishing $278,000.If you exclude government jobs that cost leaps up to more than half a million dollars each Predictably the White House says the facts are mis presented (whatever that means.).

In his June 29 press conference Obama again singled out rebates to push U.S. fossil fuel production in his demand for tax increases for an economy already threatened by double-dip recession.

The proposal compounds regulatory mischief: blocking oil and gas in the Gulf of Mexico while Chinese and other foreign companies drill off Cuba almost within sight of Florida beaches, forfeiting 250,000 jobs. “Regs” threaten West Texas fields contributing 20 percent of U.S. new production because of an obscure lizard. The White House dallies over a pipeline to bring Canadian oil sands crude to Texas refineries. While Moscow pushes Arctic prospecting, Juneau can’t get Washington to open up 14.7 million acres of state land with the critical Alaskan pipeline faltering from declining throughput.

Obama’s token strategic oil release - into the international crude pool rather than reducing U.S. pump prices - was one more feint in his ideological war on fossil fuels. [Never mind ignoring the reserve's national defense character; it was never meant as a price instrument - nor political toy.]

All this is done under the rubric of protecting the environment. “Junk science”, as many highly qualified skeptics believe, may underpin claims fossil fuels consumption decisively impacts climate change. It will take decades to know, given our shallow data for changing climate through the ages.

But “junk economics” is all too evident in the administration’s energy strategies. Granted, impediments to cheap energy were inherited from previous governments and imperfect markets. But Mr. Obama’s drive for “renewable sources” mimics earlier Carter administration’s abandoned “alternative energy” skeletons still littering the landscape.

Mr. Obama’s wind power subsides are indeed producing jobs - for China and Spain - with transferred American companies’ technology. Chinese windmills and solar panels are exported to the U.S., often replacing American manufacture.

The vignette of former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger entertaining the possibility of Chinese “high-speed rail” proposals with federal stimulus funds - just before California all but bankrupted - is quintessential of a mind set.

High salaried propagandists for tax free non-governmental organizations [NGOs] promote “the environment” through advocacy of “mass transit”, citing China’s example. They fail to note deficit-ridden Chinese government railways - whose two top executives recently were arrested for stealing tens of millions - blackmailed European and U.S. companies for technology transfers in exchange for a phantom Chinese market. Now Beijing attempts exports while their own projects operate with anemic passenger loads - at lower speeds because of faulty engineering. The misrepresentation is all too typical of limitless, mindless propaganda pumped out on a daily basis, for example on that other Washington subsidized enterprise, National Public Radio, by the Obama cheering section.

In fact, a whole new era in fossil fuels is beginning. So-called “peak oil”, the crisis posited when diminishing reserves supposedly would meet rising consumption, has vanished. New vistas have developed worldwide with expanding deep-water drilling technology - a Norwegian billion-dollar floating platform in deep water off Rio de Janeiro, a good example. New fields await discovery in our own Gulf of Mexico - the less than cataclysmic British Petroleum oil spill notwithstanding. Recovering Iraq with the world’s second largest reserves, many yet untapped, is returning with 10 million barrels a day.

Even more spectacular, a new era for natural gas suddenly has emerged with new technology exploiting vast shale reserves lying deep below rock formations in a dozen countries, not the least the U.S. [An ironic comment on priorities: Beijing is investing government billions into American companies to get at that technology.] Of course, there already has been a half-baked university “study” by enviromentalistas arguing “fracking” - the process of getting at that gas - would poison ground drinking water. The study produces not a single instance nor does it explain the risk with most such deposits lying well below aquifers.

“Politically correct” spokesmen and the mainstream media promise black magic energy solutions, for example, electric cars, ignoring almost three quarters of our electricity for recharging batteries is met with coal and gas - much less the enormous costs and problems of grid expansion required for a massive changeover.

This conjuror’s trick has gone wrong; Mr. Obama is actually cutting the beautiful young lady in half as he cripples the energy sector.

Obama must have been channeling Fritz Mondale who said “whoever is elected President will raise your taxes; they won’t tell you I just did.” Mondale was Jimmy Carter’s VP and Democratic Party 1984 Presidential candidate. Mondale. got clobbered in the election by Ronald Reagan.

Obama is attempting to block the execution in Texas today of a Mexican man because, he says, it would breach an international convention and do “irreparable harm” to US interests.

The White House has asked the US supreme court to put the execution of Humberto Leal Garcia on hold while Congress passes a law that would prevent the convicted rapist and murderer from being put to death along with dozens of other foreign nationals who were denied proper access to diplomatic representation before trials for capital crimes.

Obama moved after the governor of Texas, Rick Perry,brushed aside appeals from diplomats, top judges, senior military officers, the United Nations and former president George W Bush to stay Leal’s execution because it could jeopardize American citizens arrested abroad as well as US diplomatic interests.

Leal, 38, was convicted in 1994 of the rape and murder of a 16-year-old girl in San Antonio. Few question that he was responsible for the killing but the Texas authorities failed to tell Leal, who was born in Mexico and has lived in the US since the age of two, that under the Vienna convention he was entitled to contact the Mexican consulate when he was arrested.

The timing of Obama’s interference and possible GOP Presidential candidate Governor Rick Perry’s direct involvement and the administration’s boneheaded botching  of the recent “fast and furious” weapons sting has raised questions of politics. Ironically the interference may propel Perry into the race near the front of the pack.

Obama’s relection is in trouble. And Joe Biden is a drag not a help. So politicos are buzzing that Obama will dump Joe in favor of freshman New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. Some think the New Yorker can also help Obama with Jews that are only giving pennies on the dollar they shoveled at Obama in 2008.

Former President Bill Clinton says the nation’s corporate tax rate is “uncompetitive” and called for a lower rate as part of a “mega-deal” to raise the debt ceiling.

“When I was president, we raised the corporate income-tax rates on corporations that made over $10 million [a year],” the former president told the Aspen Ideas Festival on Saturday evening.

“It made sense when I did it. It doesn’t make sense anymore - we’ve got an uncompetitive rate. We tax at 35 percent of income, although we only take about 23 percent. So we should cut the rate to 25 percent, or whatever’s competitive, and eliminate a lot of the deductions so that we still get a fair amount, and there’s not so much variance in what the corporations pay. But how can they do that by Aug. 2?”

Clinton often brags about balancing the federal budget but seldom explains that it was President Reagan’s bloodless defeat of the Soviet Union that ender the multi0trillion dollar spending on the Cold War that enabled it. Regardless he is correct that lowering taxes on job producting businesses time has come and Obama anti-business agenda is a failure.

58 year-old . Command Sergeant-Major Jeff Mellinger was one of or perhaps the last draftee back in 1972 and now he is retiring.. In recent years, he survived 27 roadside bombings while deployed in Iraq.

Then there is 76 year-old Army Doctor Dr. John Burson, an ear, nose and throat specialist from Villa Rica, Georgia who is still serving near the front lines in Afghanistan. He may not have seen it all, but he brings a lot of history to his work at a US military clinic in Kabul, Afghanistan.

“There not sure if I’m a father figure or a grandfather figure,” Dr. Burson says. “I carry with me mostly an appreciation for the incredible sacrifice I see among the young people here. The real dedication, the love of country…it’s an opportunity to come back and sort of pay back a little to your country.”

Between 1970 and 1998 when well-meaning U. S. foreign aid to Africa was at its peak, over the same time the poverty rate in Africa rose from 11 percent to 66 percent. There is robust argument about why. But , lilte authentic dispute of those stark facts - sending thousands of well meaning NGO folks to roar around in Land Rovers while lining the pockets of corrupt African bureaucrats who stuffed offshore bank accounts with American dollars, It has been a huge waste of money then and now.

Friedrich August Hayek (8 May 1899 - 23 March 1992), born in Austria-Hungary as Friedrich August von Hayek, was an economist and philosopher best known for his defense of free-market capitalism against socialist and collectivist thought. He is considered to be one of the most important economists and political philosophers of the twentieth century, winning the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1974.

In his youth, like many, socialism attracted him, but in his maturity to ejected the ideas of the notorious bi-sexual John Maynard Keynes (1883 - 1946).. FDR was a devotee to the very end despite ample evidence his massive spending in the 1830 failed to end the depenssion.

Later in life Hayek influenced the likes of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

Hayek’s popular book, The Road to Serfdom (1944) and in subsequent works, Hayek argued that socialism required central economic planning and that such planning in turn leads towards totalitarianism.

It has to be noticed that Obama and company are Keynesian subscribers, and reject Hayek. In May, 1939 FDR’s Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., told the House Ways and Means Committee:

“We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong…somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises…I say after eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started…And an enormous debt to boot!”

Read Reader’s Digest version at http://hayekcenter.org/?p=682

The symbol on the “pound” key (#) is called an octothorpe.

A 428-page report by state investigators on alleged cheating in Atlanta Public Schools was released on Tuesday, Gov. Nathan Deal released only a two-page summary of the report showing organized, systemic cheating in Atlantic Public Schools by scores of educators, including 38 principals.

Deal says “there will be consequences” for educators who cheated and has forwarded the findings to three district attorneys as well as state and city education officials.

Three primary conditions led to widespread cheating: unrealistic testing targets from the district, unreasonable pressure on teachers and principals to achieve those targets and a “culture of fear, intimidation and retaliation” that spread district wide.

The probe finds that Atlanta Superintendent Beverly Hall and her administration emphasized test results “to the exclusion of integrity and ethics.”

Hall, who recently retired after 12 years as superintendent, has denied involvement in any cheating, but acknowledged wrongdoing by other district employees.

Among other findings:

–50% of the classes at one middle school showed unusual signs of erasures of wrong answers on state-mandated tests and substitution of correct answers. The report says the principal at the school ordered a teacher and two staff members who find wrong answers to “make them right.”

–Teachers at one elementary school used “non-verbal signals” to get students to change wrong answers and also arranged the seating so that some students could cheat off others.

–Cheating was detected at 44 of 56 schools examined.

–178 educators, including 38 principals, were found to have engaged in cheating. Of that group, 82 confessed to cheating.

Of the six men who made up the Three Stooges, three of them were real brothers (Moe, Curly and Shemp.)

Obama is pressing congressional leaders to consider a far-reaching debt-reduction plan that would force Democrats to accept major changes to Social Security and Medicare in exchange for Republican support for fresh tax increases.

At a meeting with top House and Senate leaders set for this morning, Obama plans to argue that a rare consensus has emerged about the size and scope of the nation’s budget problems and that policymakers should seize the moment to take dramatic action.

Republicans showed new signs of flexibility to break a budget impasse Wednesday, but the White House raised the ante, pushing for more deficit reduction and casting the GOP as defenders of corporate tax giveaways. (July 6). Obama’s frequent criticism of corporate jets is disingenuous because it is NOT a tax giveaway but an accelerated write down for costs.

As part of his pitch, Obama is proposing significant reductions in Medicare spending and for the first time is offering to tackle the rising cost of Social Security, according to people in both parties with knowledge of the proposal. The move marks a major shift for the White House and could present a direct challenge to Democratic lawmakers who have vowed to protect health and retirement benefits from the assault on government spending.

“Obviously, there will be some Democrats who don’t believe we need to do entitlement reform. But there seems to be some hunger to do something of some significance,” said a Democratic official familiar with the administration’s thinking. “These moments come along at most once a decade. And it would be a real mistake if we let it pass us by.”

Rather than roughly $2 trillion in savings, the White House is now seeking a plan that would slash more than $4 trillion from annual budget deficits over the next decade, stabilize borrowing, and defuse the biggest budgetary time bombs that are set to explode as the cost of health care rises and the nation’s population ages. Most Notable is Obama’s refusal to take Obamacare off the table.