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SEPTEMBER 7,  2014

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 11:43 P.M. ET: 

JOLT – From AP:  "TOKYO (AP) -- Japan's economy contracted at a larger than earlier estimated annual rate of 7.1 percent in April-June, as companies and households slashed spending following a tax hike.  The revised data released Monday show business investment fell more than twice as much as estimated before, or 5.1 percent, while private residential spending sank 10.4 percent, in annual terms. The earlier estimate showed the economy contracting 6.8 percent."  Weren't these the people who were supposed eat us alive about 30 years ago?  And they shouldn't have attacked Pearl Harbor either.

LIBERAL GOVERNMENT SHINES AGAIN – From the Detroit Free Press:  "Detroit is so broke that firefighters get emergency alerts through pop cans, coins, door hinges, pipes and doorbells.  And they make these gizmos themselves — one involving a pop can that gets tipped over by an incoming fax. The clink of the can means there’s an emergency. Then there’s the chain-reaction gadget: a fax hits a door hinge, which then tugs on a wire, which then sets off a doorbell.  'It sounds unbelievable, but it’s truly what the guys have been doing and dealing with for a long, long time,' said Detroit Deputy Fire Commissioner John Berlin, adding that technological upgrades are long overdue. 'We’re in desperate need. We’re probably 30 years behind.'"  The fact is, the people of Detroit would probably again elect the same people who got them into this.

THE DREAM FACTORY DREAMS ON – From Bloomberg:  "Walt Disney Co. (DIS)’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” again led the box office as movie ticket sales tumbled to the lowest level in 13 years during a traditionally slow weekend.  The superhero film from Disney’s Marvel division collected $10.2 million in U.S. and Canadian theaters, racking up its fourth win, the most of any film this year, Rentrak Corp. (RENT) said today in an e-mailed statement. “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” from Viacom Inc. (VIAB)’s Paramount Pictures, placed second with $6.5 million in its fifth week.  Ticket sales for all movies were $65 million, the weakest total since the weekend that started Sept. 21, 2001, Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Rentrak, said by telephone today. Sales followed the typical slowdown that occurs after the U.S. Labor Day holiday, he said. Also, there were no new breakout releases."  Of course, the quality of the movies has nothing to do with this decline.  We all know it's caused by global warming.

September 7,  2014     Permalink

INCOMPETENT – AT 9:58 A.M. ET:  Capable presidents maintain good and close relations with Congress, even sometimes with their opponents.  From Fox: 

President Obama will meet Tuesday with Capitol Hill leaders to discuss pressing foreign-policy issues including how to combat Islamic State terrorists, as Congress comes back from summer break and the president returns from a NATO summit.

The Oval office meeting is scheduled to include Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada; Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.; House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio; and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

They are expected to discuss a range of world issues including whether to launch more air strikes on Islamic State and Russia’s foray into eastern Ukraine.

The meeting between Obama and Hill leaders will also be their first since mid-June, when they met to discuss the terror group’s deadly march into northern Iraq, as reported first by The Washington Post.

COMMENT:  Their first meeting since mid-June.  That's three months, with crisis after crisis building up.  And Obama wonders why he's considered incompetent and aloof.

Jimmy Carter, you've met your match.

September 7, 2014       Permalink

COMING SOON TO A NEIGHBORHOOD NEAR YOU – AT 8:46 A.M. ET:  A portrait of multiculturalism gone mad.  From Breitbart London: 

Residents of the German city of Wuppertal have expressed concern after a group of young radical Islamists started taking to the streets late at night, trying to deter revellers from drinking and gambling.

The self-styled "Sharia Police" have been patrolling an area around the city's main train station, declaring the popular nightlife area to be a "Sharia Controlled Zone". Deutshe Welle reports that witnesses have seen them handing out leaflets urging people not to drink alcohol, attend concerts, gamble, watch pornography or visit prostitutes.

The men are believed to be from the Salafi sect of Islam, which is closely related to the puritanical Wahhabi belief practised in Saudi Arabia. They walk around dressed in orange high-visibility vests with the words "Sharia Police" written on the back in English.

The city's real police said they stopped 11 men aged between 19 and 33 on Wednesday night, and may bring charges of illegal assembly against them. However, after numerous residents complained to them, they have now also set up a hotline allowing people to report their concerns about the group.

Local police chief Birgitta Rademacher said that provocation and intimidation "won't be tolerated", adding that only officers appointed by the state had the right to act as police in Germany.

The city's mayor, Peter Jung, supported the police's stance: "These people's intention is to provoke and intimidate and force their ideology [upon others]," he said.

"This is an open and tolerant city, which is proud of the fact that people of different religions and convictions live together in peace."

COMMENT:  If truth be told, it's a slow creep forward for radicalism.  The city officials may speak bravely, but in too many cities, especially in England, there have been concessions to radical Islam.  In this country, under Obama, radical Islamists have been invited to the White House.  The mainstream press is often silent about the influence of radical Islam in schools, universities and even government agencies.  We simply don't get the fact that radical Islam is a political movement, not just a violent offshoot of a religion.  There are some indications that the sheer brutality of the Islamic State is waking some people up.  We hope they awaken in time.

September 7, 2014       Permalink

POSSIBLE? – AT 8:23 A.M. ET:  An Arab news source that we don't know, is reporting the following, claiming it was also reported by AFP, the leading French news agency.  The White House and Pentagon are not confirming.  We present it only as something that is running right now, and getting attention:

Iraqi forces reported that the head of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) 'Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi' was killed in U.S airstrikes.

"Despite that Iraqi and U.S sources confirmed the killing of Abu Bajr al-Baghdadi, but the White House did not confirmed it yet", AFP reported.

Three senior members of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) - including an aide to its leader - were killed in a U.S. airstrike in Iraq, a senior Iraqi security official told NBC News Thursday. The strike on the ISIS stronghold of Mosul killed Abu Hajar Al-Sufi, an aide to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, as well as an explosives operative and the military leader of nearby Tel Afar, the source said on condition of anonymity. Al Arabiya cited the Iraqi Defense Ministry saying Baghdadi's aide had been killed.

Pentagon Spokesman Col. Steve Warren could not confirm the deaths and said ISIS leaders had not been targeted. But he added that if ISIS leaders were embedded "inside troop formations they are likely to be killed." The U.S. has been carrying out airstrikes across the country's north after the brutal terror group gained ground in a murderous sweep in June.

COMMENT:  We'll just have to wait and see.  Sometimes these stories are correct, and sometimes they're started by political opponents of the allegedly departed loved one, just to make trouble.

Even if al-Baghdadi has gone to get his 72 virgins, it might make little difference.  The Islamic State is based on an idea, a frightening idea.  It will, unfortunately, live on.

September 7, 2014     Permalink

SEPTEMBER 6,  2014

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 10:41 P.M. ET:

THE PERPETUAL CAMPAIGN – From The New York Times:  "WASHINGTON — President Obama will delay taking executive action on immigration until after the midterm elections, bowing to pressure from fellow Democrats who feared that acting now could doom his party’s chances this fall, White House officials said on Saturday.  The decision is a reversal of Mr. Obama’s vow to issue broad directives to overhaul the immigration system soon after summer’s end, and sparked swift anger from immigration advocates."  The decision also means that Obama will propose radical measures, the kind that lose elections.  This is pretty much an admission.

ABSURD – From AP:  "WASHINGTON (AP) — The Internal Revenue Service has lost emails from five more employees who are part of congressional probes into the treatment of conservative groups that applied for tax-exempt status, the tax service disclosed Friday.  The IRS said in June that it could not locate an untold number of emails to and from Lois Lerner, who headed the IRS division that processes applications for tax-exempt status. The revelation set off a new round of investigations and congressional hearings."  Tell me, how many e-mails have you lost in the last two years?  I mean, lost to the point where you couldn't find them, ever.  Yeah.  I didn't lose too many either.  Will the mainstream media please wake up.

BABY BOOMERS ARE THE NEW OLD – From the Washington Post:  "TV is increasingly for the old, and the Internet is for the young, according to new research by media analyst Michael Nathanson of Moffett Nathanson Research.  The median age of a broadcast or cable television viewer during the 2013-2014 TV season was 44.4 years old, a 6 percent increase in age from four years earlier. Audiences for the major broadcast network shows are much older and aging even faster, with a median age of 53.9 years old, up 7 percent from four years ago.  These television viewers are aging faster than the U.S. population, Nathanson points out. The median age in the U.S. was 37.2, according to the U.S. Census, a figure that increased 1.9 percent over a decade. So to put that in context of television viewing, he said TV audiences aged 5 percent faster than the average American."  I love it.  I want to know how those "anti-war" activists of the 1960s feel when they read they're considered "old" by the TV industry.  From "the voices of youth" to surplus.  What a ride.

September 6, 2014      Permalink

THE TRUE REALISTS – AT 9:44 A.M. ET:  Robert Kagan joins Victor Davis Hanson in warning Americans that the lessons of history cannot be ignored, as we maneuver through this age of new threats.   Yearning for peace does not create peace.  Hatred of war never stopped a war.  Kagan, in The Wall Street Journal – gives us our quote of the day:

The wise men and women of our own time insist that this history is irrelevant. They tell us, when they are not announcing America's irrevocable decline, that our adversaries are too weak to pose a real threat, even as they pile victory upon victory. Russia is a declining power, they argue. But then, Russia has been declining for 400 years. Can declining powers not wreak havoc? Does it help us to know that, in retrospect, Japan lacked the wealth and power to win the war it started in 1941?

Let us hope that those who urge calm are right, but it is hard to avoid the impression that we have already had our 1931. As we head deeper into our version of the 1930s, we may be quite shocked, just as our forebears were, at how quickly things fall apart.

COMMENT: It's even worse when the president of the United States doesn't know when they're falling apart, or may not care.

Those Americans who push for non-involvement, neutrality, or unilateral disarmament never quite grasp that we actually have enemies, and they do indeed think differently on matters of war and peace.

September 6, 2014       Permalink

NOTHING TO SEE, NOTHING TO SEE – AT 6:34 A.M. ET:   We knew this was bound to happen.  Common sense.  From The New York Times: 

The United States expressed concern on Thursday that Syria’s government might be harboring undeclared chemical weapons, hidden from the internationally led operation to purge them over the past year, and that Islamist militant extremists now ensconced in that country could possibly seize control of them.

The assertions by Samantha Power, the United States ambassador to the United Nations and current president of the Security Council, were made after the Council received a private briefing on the Syria chemical weapons disarmament effort from Sigrid Kaag, the United Nations official appointed last year to coordinate it. Under Ms. Kaag, 96 percent of Syria’s declared chemical weapons stockpile, including all of the most lethal materials, have been destroyed.

Please note the word "declared." 

But Ms. Kaag told reporters after the briefing that Syria had yet to address what she described as “some discrepancies or questions” about whether it had accounted for all of the chemical weapons in its arsenal. She also said Syria had yet to destroy seven hangars and five tunnels used for mixing and storing the weapons — which is required under the chemical weapons treaty that Syria has signed. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the Hague-based group that collaborated with the United Nations in overseeing the Syrian chemical disarmament, is now responsible for ensuring that Syria honors its promise.

COMMENT:  That agreement with Syria last year, in which the Syrians promised to rid themselves of chemical weapons, looked too good to be true.  It appears that our skepticism may have been justified.  I an't imagine a regime like Assad's declaring everything and not holding some weapons back.

September 6, 2014       Permalink

OH, THIS IS JUICY – AT 6:24 A.M. ET:  The knives are out.  The sharpener arrives every day.  The 2016 presidential campaign is running.  From the Washington Examiner: 

Less than a month after former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton distanced herself from President Obama by ridiculing his foreign policy, a key member of the Clinton kitchen cabinet is out with a new book that slams U.S. policy as “muddled, irresolute, and even feckless.”

Doug Schoen’s double-barreled blast at Obama in the new book, The Russia-China Axis: The New Cold War and America’s Crisis of Leadership, is the latest sign that Clinton’s team will throw Obama under the bus if that’s what it takes to get her into the White House.

“President Obama’s America is a passive, confused and ineffective superpower,” opens the book.

In the searing critique, Schoen, a polling giant who aided Bill Clinton’s reelection, and co-author and journalist Melik Kaylan argue that Obama hasn’t just been one of the weakest presidents in decades, but is putting the United States in danger.

"Unless we fundamentally change the foreign-policy approach we have followed under President Obama, we will continue to lose ground — as will the cause of democracy and freedom around the world,” the duo wrote in the book from Encounter Books.

Echoing Hillary Clinton’s slap at her former boss last month in an Atlantic Magazine interview, they added, “The world’s superpower has no foreign-policy vision or strategy — unless one believes that Obama’s doctrine of ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is visionary or that his resolute selling of his policies as anti-Bush and anti-war is a workable framework for dealing with a dangerous world."

Schoen is a founding partner of the powerhouse Democratic polling firm Penn, Schoen & Berland, which includes Mark Penn, a top advisor to Clinton’s 2008 presidential bid. The book raises red flags over warming relations between China and Russia and suggests that the U.S. better wake up and challenge the new “axis” or get left behind.

COMMENT:  It is unlikely that the book could be written and published without Hillary's approval, or at least her nod.  There is already visible tension between the Obama and Clinton camps.  The Clintons mightily resent Obama's "stealing" the nomination from Hillary in 2008.  This book will not warm things. 

What's more, the main arguments in the book are so, so...Reagan.

September 6,  2014     Permalink