Current Events - August 8, 2013

Schiff: 2/3 of America to Lose
Everything Because of This Crisis

 A record breaking stock market is distorting a frightening reality:  The U.S. is being eaten alive by a horrific cancer that will ultimately destroy the economy and impoverish the vast majority of its citizens.

That's according to Peter Schiff, the best-selling author and CEO of Euro Pacific Capital, who delivered his harsh warning to investors in a recent interview on Fox Business.

"I think we are heading for a worse economic crisis than we had in 2007," Schiff said.  "You're going to have a collapse in the dollar...a huge spike in interest rates... and our whole economy, which is built on the foundation of cheap money, is going to topple when you pull the rug out from under it."

Schiff says that, despite "phony" signs of an economic recovery, the cancer destroying America stems from a lethal concoction of our $16 trillion federal debt and the Fed's never ending money printing.

Currently, Bernanke and company is buying $1 trillion of Treasury and mortgage bonds a year. That's about $85 billion per month against a budget deficit that is about the same level.

According to Schiff, these numbers are unsustainable. And the Fed has no credible "exit strategy."

Eventually interest rates will rise... and when they do, Schiff says, stocks will tank and bonds dip to nothing. Massive new tax hikes will be imposed and programs and entitlements will be cut to the bone.

 "The crisis is imminent," Schiff said.  "I don't think Obama is going to finish his second term without the bottom dropping out. And stock market investors are oblivious to the problems."

 "We're broke, Schiff added.  "We owe trillions. Look at our budget deficit; look at the debt to GDP ratio, the unfunded liabilities. If we were in the Eurozone, they would kick us out."

Schiff points out that the market gains experienced recently, with the Dow first topping 14,000 on its way to setting record highs, are giving investors a false sense of security. 

"It's not that the stock market is gaining value... it's that our money is losing value. And so if you have a debased currency... a devalued currency, the price of everything goes up. Stocks are no exception," he said.
"The Fed knows that the U.S. economy is not recovering," he noted. "It simply is being kept from collapse by artificially low interest rates and quantitative easing. As that support goes, the economy will implode."

A noted economist, Schiff has been a fierce critic of the Fed and its policies for years. And his warnings have proven to be prophetic. 

In August 2006, when the Dow was hitting new highs nearly every day, Schiff said in an interview: "The United States is like the Titanic, and I'm here with the lifeboat trying to get people to leave the ship... I see a real financial crisis coming for the United States."

Just over a year later, the meltdown that became the Great Recession began, just as Schiff predicted.
He also predicted the subprime mortgage bubble burst, nearly a year before the real estate market fully crashed.

His recent warnings, however, have been even more alarming.  Will they also prove to be true?

In his most recent book, "The Real Crash" How to Save Yourself and Your Country", Schiff writes that
when the "real crash" comes," it will be worse than the Great Depression. 

Unemployment will skyrocket, credit will dry up, and worse, the dollar will collapse completely, "wiping out all savings and sending consumer prices into the stratosphere."

Schiff estimates this "cancer" could consume a trillion dollars from consumers this year.

"Today we're the world's greatest debtor nation. Companies, homeowners and banks are so highly leveraged, rising interest rates will be devastating."

According to polls, the average American is indeed sensing danger. A recent survey found that 61% of Americans believe a catastrophe is looming - yet only 15% feel prepared for such a deeply troubling event.

Is Devastation The Ultimate Cure?

Despite its bleak outlook, Schiff's book has become a real wake-up call for millions of readers.
While Schiff's predictions can be grim, he also offers step-by-step solutions that average Americans can follow to protect their wealth, investments and savings.

According to Schiff, "the crash and what follows" can be beneficial. But only for those who understand beforehand what is happening and have time to prepare for the devastation.

"All we can do now is prepare for the crash," Schiff said. "If we brace ourselves properly and control the impact, we will survive it."


http://moneymorning.com/ob-article/schiff-us-will-win-currency-war.php?code=3243

How's the left-wing, ivory-tower, we-know-best elitist Obamanomics working for you? Here's the news.

http://moneymorning.com/ob-article/schiff-us-will-win-currency-war.php?code=3243

When Will They See That This Is One Bad Recovery?

First-quarter gross domestic product numbers for 2013 were recently revised -- downward from 1.8 percent to 1.1 percent. For perspective, four years into the recovery from the last deep recession in '81-'82, the economy grew at 4.1 percent. 

What about the declining "labor force participation rate"? 

This counts the percentage of civilians 16 years and older working or actively looking for work. When President Barack Obama took office, the labor force participation rate was 65.7. Today it is 63.4, up 0.1 from April's 34-year low. Frustrated, many able-bodied and able-minded would-be workers have simply given up looking for jobs. 

The number of people receiving federally subsidized food assistance today exceeds the number of full-time, private-sector working Americans. The number of Americans receiving foods stamps (now called SNAP) has reached 47.5 million, increasing an average of 13 percent a year from 2008 to 2012. Almost 9 million disabled American workers currently collect federal Social Security benefits -- double the number of disabled in the late '90s -- many admitting that they could work, but choose not to look. 

Just to break even -- to keep pace with new entrants into the market -- the economy must produce 150,000 jobs per month. To date, Obama's four years of recovery have produced 4,657,000 jobs -- an average of 97,020 per month. At this juncture in the '80s, following the last big recession, the economy had produced 11.2 million new jobs, or 233,333 per month. 

Even left-wing media outlets like ABC and The Washington Post cannot pretend that this is normal. About the advance estimate of the most recent quarter's dismal 1.7 percent growth, a Post business writer said: "It isn't even mediocre. It's terrible. It's a sign of the diminished economic expectations ... that it's anything to crow about at all. ABC called this latest report "disappointing." Of course, neither ABC nor The Washington Post attributed the disappointing results to anything President Obama has done. 

But President Ronald Reagan took an entirely different course than has Obama. Reagan dramatically lowered taxes, reduced the speed of domestic spending and continued deregulation policies of Jimmy Carter. The economy took off, and three years into recovery, had produced an 8.9 percent increase in civilian employment -- almost 9 million jobs, with a post-recovery GDP that averaged over 5 percent. 

The Reagan recovery was no aberration. Spending and tax cuts between 1922 and 1929 gave us the so-called "roaring '20s," when unemployment fell from 6.7 percent to 3.2 percent, and real gross national product grew at an annual average rate of 4.7 percent. Similarly, when President George W. Bush lowered taxes, the economy took off, and the unemployment rate went down to a low of 4.4 in 2006. 

Democrats brag about the robust Clinton economy. But President Bill Clinton inherited an economy in its 22nd month of recovery. And Democrat historians ignore the economy-damaging measures that Clinton attempted -- most notably HillaryCare -- but could not pull off because Republicans stopped him. 

Seventy-four percent of small-business owners say they plan to reduce hours, put off hiring or fire people to minimize the impact of ObamaCare. ObamaCare kicks in at 50 employees and applies to full-time workers. So employers keep the number of workers under 50 and-or reduce hours to less than full-time (30 hours or more), and they get around ObamaCare. What this does to the economy and job creation is another story. 

In 2009, Obama's economic team outlined the path of the economy "if we do nothing" versus the path of the economy with Obama's plans for stimulus and ObamaCare. Team Obama predicted an unemployment rate, at this point in the recovery, of 5 percent -- with his "stimulus." If Obama did nothing, they predicted, unemployment would reach 5 percent by the beginning of 2014. Today unemployment is at 7.4 percent, artificially low considering the number of people who have given up. 

What will it take for them to say they were wrong? How many more Americans must remain unemployed or underemployed before the left stops blaming G.W. Bush, the GOP-led House or global warming?
Historically, the deeper the recession, the higher the bounce back. Since World War II, this recovery has been by far the weakest. The question is why. 

Our history shows that burdening the productive through higher taxes, especially during sluggishness, hurts the economy. Imposing billions of dollars in new federal regulations, as this administration has done, hurts the economy. Placing nearly one-seventh of the nation's economy -- via ObamaCare -- under the control of the federal government hurts the economy. 

This is an arrogant administration led by a man distrustful of the private sector and devoid of experience in it. Obama is cheered and emboldened by a compliant media that would "report" relentlessly on the "jobless recovery of President X" were these the economic numbers of a Republican president. Stacked with power-assuming administrative "czars," the Obama administration fancies itself enlightened and noble, in complete possession of the wisdom needed to know from whom to take and to whom to give. 

Therefore, to paraphrase former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, "What difference do these bad numbers make?" 

http://townhall.com/columnists/larryelder/2013/08/08/when-will-they-see-that-this-is-one-bad-recovery-n1658962/page/full

Bill O'Reilly is Smarter Than Lawrence O'Donnell

After attacking Bill O'Reilly's history last week, I'll defend his sociology this week. On Monday, MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell ridiculed Fox News' O'Reilly for saying that single motherhood is responsible for the the high black crime rate.
O'Reilly said, quite correctly: "The reason there is so much violence and chaos in the black precincts is the disintegration of the African-American family. Right now, about 73 percent of all black babies are born out of wedlock. That drives poverty. And the lack of involved fathers leads to young boys growing up resentful and unsupervised. And it has nothing to do with slavery. It has everything to do with you Hollywood people and you derelict parents."
O'Donnell mocked O'Reilly, saying that "the struggles of black America have nothing to do with slavery in Bill O'Reilly's very narrow and uneducated mind." He then droned on about some paper Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote about slavery.
Take that, Bill O'Reilly!
While I'm sure that was a fascinating little monograph Moynihan wrote about slavery, O'Donnell cited nothing in it that contradicted O'Reilly. Apparently, Moynihan found that American slavery was "the most awful the world has ever known." True, but unfortunately that has nothing to do with what O'Reilly said.
It doesn't even sound like Moynihan was attributing black illegitimacy to slavery. O'Donnell's point was simply that the great Moynihan had written about slavery being bad, so all discussion must end.
Fortunately, all discussion did not end for Erol Ricketts, a (black) demographer and sociologist with the Rockefeller Foundation who researched the origin of black female-headed families in the 1980s. His studies showed that the black family was thriving from the late 19th century through most of the 20th century.
You don't get much poorer, deprived or discriminated against than being a black person in America just a generation out of slavery.

Examining nearly a century of U.S. census reports, Ricketts found that between 1890 and 1950, blacks had higher marriage rates than whites. Until 1970, black women were more likely to get married than white women -- and that was despite the high mortality rates among black men, leaving fewer available for marriage. In three of four decennial years between 1890 and 1920, black men out-married white men.
(You all really should read Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama. It's chock-full of interesting facts like this.)
Whatever else may cause illegitimacy and its associated problems, it isn't poverty, discrimination, lack of education, unemployment or slavery. Black Americans had all those handicaps -- and yet they still had strong families and low crime rates from 1890 until the 1960s.
But in the '60s, liberals decided it would be a great idea to start subsidizing illegitimacy.
Everyone knew -- even FDR's secretary of labor, Francis Perkins, knew -- that granting widows' benefits to unmarried women with illegitimate children would have disastrous consequences. An early 20th-century social welfare advocate, Homer Folks, warned back in 1914 that to grant pensions for "desertion or illegitimacy would, undoubtedly, have the effect of a premium upon these crimes against society."
But under President Lyndon Johnson, that's exactly what the government did. The "suitable home" requirements for welfare -- such as having a husband -- were jettisoned by liberal know-it-alls in the federal Bureau of Public Assistance. As a result, illegitimacy went through the roof, particularly among blacks, our most vulnerable fellow citizens.
In 1970, for the first time, the marriage rate for black women fell below 70 percent. But even then, a majority of black children were still living with both parents. By 2010, only 30.1 percent of blacks above the age of 15 were married, compared to 52.7 percent of whites.
Liberals keep using the bad consequences of their policies as an argument for more of the same policies. Government subsidies to unwed mothers increase the illegitimacy rate, which in turn leads to poverty, criminal behavior and more illegitimacy. So Democrats reverse cause and effect to claim it's the poverty that causes illegitimacy and then demand more payments to unwed mothers.
But we know poverty does not cause illegitimacy. The black experience from 1890 to 1960 proves it. It's the reverse, just as Bill O'Reilly said. If African-Americans started marrying again at their pre-Great Society rates, it would wipe out the entire black "culture of poverty."
Nor is there a speck of evidence that poverty causes crime. Murder is the only crime that has been reliably tracked since 1900. From the turn of the century right up to the early 1930s, the murder rate rose steadily, with a few peaks and valleys. Then it began a noticeable decline right at the beginning of the Great Depression, remaining low until the mid-1940s, and rising again only at the end of the Depression.
The converse happened during the economic boom of the "go-go" '80s. The homicide rate shot up in the 1970s and stayed high until the mid-1990s. Both the homicide rate and general crime rate have remained at all-time lows through the economic wasteland of the Obama years. (Thanks to Republican crime policies.)
So while it's fascinating that Moynihan concluded that slavery was awful (I think we knew that!), O'Reilly is absolutely right that it's illegitimacy driving the black crime rate. 

http://townhall.com/columnists/anncoulter/2013/08/07/bill-oreilly-is-smarter-than-lawrence-odonnell-n1658938/page/full

That Word vs. America

 So Tim Allen has decided to publicly defuse that most egregious of English words: the six-letter one that starts with n and ends with r.

Allen is not the first you'd guess would attempt such a thing. He's a distinct example of the nonaggressive type of comic -- not quite the schmoe dumped on by the entire universe, but not far from that either.  The kind of comic you'd encounter in Disney films, Dagwood Bumstead in the flesh.
This has been done before, but by edgy, wild-eyed types such as Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor. Neither quite defanged the term -- Bruce was operating in the midst of the cultural revolution that would set the modern view of race in concrete, while Pryor, a figure of the 70s, was transparently playing off of white guilt. The times just weren't right; you can't run a railroad if the tracks aren't laid down first.
But today in the new millennium, things are different. As the Zimmerman trial has revealed, the race card has become frayed and tattered from continual overuse. Whites don't feel very guilty anymore, a full century and a half after the demise of slavery and fifty years after the collapse of legal segregation. A solution to the racial impasse of the past half-century, in which every last American, white, black, or "other," has been forced to act as if both those historical inequities ended only last Tuesday -- if in fact they'd ended at all -- is long overdue.  A solution to the n-word conundrum is a central element of this.
Nothing symbolizes American racial tensions more than this single word (if that's the actual term for it --- see below). It's the definition of a fighting word, a word so radioactive it cannot be touched. It's the word that destroyed Paula Deen's vast food empire, the word that played a large part in freeing O.J. The Justice Department, under the wise and judicious Eric Holder, is now spending vast amounts of government money in an attempt to discover whether a man found not guilty in a court of law ever uttered it, under the supposition that it will render him guilty again.
It has been abused by race hustlers of all stripes for generations. Every few years the debate churns up again, triggered by some loudmouth rapper or an unfortunate honest grandmother. We get the bit lips and hurt expressions from black public figures, the overeager apologies from white betas, the solemn processions of blacks carrying coffins marked "the N-word". Everybody wants to see it gone, buried at the crossroads with a stake in its heart. But like a movie zombie, it always gets up and goes shambling into town once again, looking for Paula Deens to bite. 
Why all this effort? Because we all know that when that word is at last abolished, we will look around and see that there is no more Klan, that no one is being lynched any longer, that segregation has been overcome, that civil rights have been guaranteed to all Americans.
Of course, it has been generations since all that actually occurred. Most of the burdens on blacks, legal and social, have been removed. Trillions have been spent on the cause of repairing the ravages of racism. Atrocious racist attacks against blacks have become so rare (the last occurring with James Byrd in Texas in 1998) that they have to be manufactured, as in the Zimmermann case. In point of fact, there have been rumors that the president of the United States has a substantial black African heritage -- though how that can be in such a racist environment is something impossible to surmise.
But since we still have that potent n-word, nothing has actually changed.
This state of affairs reveals an odd sense of weakness among blacks. We've been told constantly that black Americans are tougher than inbred whites, stronger, manlier, and more athletic, and the success of black sports figures suggests that there's at least a small grain of truth in this. But it's a strange kind of strength that utterly collapses with the use of a single word. Once it is uttered, whether in insult or inadvertence (as seems to have been the case with Riley Cooper) or even as a homophone (We all remember the case where a Washington bureaucrat used "niggardly" in front of a black colleague, who then stormed from the room. The official resigned, the country was thrown into uproar, and our honest media put serious effort into trying to demonstrate that the two words were actually related. All this over a single word that sounded a little like another word.)  Apparently blacks hearing the term collapse into despair. All activity ceases, all hopes are blasted. All progress made by an entire people since the days of Frederick Douglass is utterly cancelled out.
Every white, whether responsible of not, shares the shame and guilt of the speaker. The United States as a whole is revealed as a fraud and a hoax, a machine for destroying the descendants of slavery. Hatred and violence between the races is once again rendered eternal and poisonous. All because somebody spoke one word -- or didn't.
Other groups, ethnic and otherwise, don't operate this way. Customarily, groups adopt an insult as a show of defiance and solidarity, to demonstrate to their enemies that it doesn't hurt them and they'll have to do better next time. Mick, Jarhead, cowboy... ("Wop" is a strange one, an insult that originated as a compliment: guapo -- handsome.) "Yankee" began as an insult -- in fact, a double insult. It was first used by the Hudson Valley Dutch to describe the new English settlers (its origins are rather obscure -- it's either a local term for "blockhead" or a corruption of "John Cheese," reflecting the English propensity for founding dairy farms). A few decades later, British officers fighting in the French and Indian War used it to disparage American troops. During the Revolution, the colonials adopted not only the term, but the nasty little ditty the British had cooked up as well. Yankee Doodle Dandy paid the Limeys back in spades at Yorktown. (A century later the Confederates attempted to reinvigorate the term with little success. Oddly, using "rebel" can cause trouble even today in some corners of the South.)
There has been recent movement among rappers to do exactly this with the dreaded 5 letter word. By slightly altering the spelling and pronunciation, rap artists (NWA being the most notable example) have gotten clean away with it, even on the public airwaves. (Dr. Rachel Jeantel's analysis can be overlooked as something she learned on a street corner.) If this process were allowed to continue, the word would be defanged within a few years, an outcome far less unlikely than the possibility of rappers actually doing something beneficial for society. But that's not going to happen.
It's not going to happen because the word represents something to blacks that is effectively invisible to whites. It is a symbol of black pathology, as difficult to make sense of as the fears and obsessions of a neurotic. The word acts as a talisman. It's a crutch and an excuse. It is a cover for fear of failure, lack of confidence, and self-contempt. As long as some white, somewhere, can be presumed to be using -- or even thinking -- that word, racism still exists. As long as "nigger" remains potent, blacks don't have to try. They can resist taking on the full responsibilities of citizenship and continue badgering whites for pity and sympathy. The word is simply too useful to do without.
So while we can encourage Tim Allen in his crusade, little is likely to come of it. It could well be a simple matter -- Lenny Bruce suggested that President Kennedy use it in a speech (something that would make even more sense for Obama). It can and should be defused, at least to a point where helpless grandmothers aren't victimized over it. 
No word should have that kind of power. Particularly not a word that, for all practical purposes, is no more than a Southern backwoods mispronunciation of "Negro". A mistake, with no particular intrinsic content or inherent meaning whatsoever.
American blacks will never be truly free until they abandon the word, until they overcome its illusory power at last. Only they themselves can do this. The rest of us can only wait and hope that they muster the maturity to take that step.
At least this Mick does, anyway.

 http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/08/that_word_vs_america.html#ixzz2bPQK6bHC

America as Pill Bug

Closing our embassies was prudent in the short term. But what message does it send?

We’ve all run across the pill bug in our gardens. At the first sign of danger, the tiny paranoid crustacean suddenly turns into a ball — in hopes the danger will have passed when he unrolls.

That roly-poly bug can serve as a fair symbol of present-day U.S. foreign policy, especially in our understandable weariness over Iraq, Afghanistan, and the scandals that are overwhelming the Obama administration.

On August 4, U.S. embassies across the Middle East simply closed on the basis of intelligence reports of planned al-Qaeda violence. The shutdown of 21 diplomatic facilities was the most extensive in recent American history.

Yet we still have over a month to go before the twelfth anniversary of the attacks on September 11, 2001, an iconic date for radical Islamists.

Such preemptive measures are no doubt sober and judicious. Yet if we shut down our entire public profile in the Middle East on the threat of terrorism, what will we do when more anti-American violence arises? Should we close more embassies for more days, or return home altogether?

Apparently al-Qaeda did not get the message that the administration’s euphemisms of “workplace violence,” “overseas contingency operations,” “man-caused disasters,” and jihad as “a holy struggle” were intended as outreach to the global Muslim community.

Instead, the terrorists are getting their second wind, as they interpret our loud magnanimity as weakness — or, more likely, simple confusion. They increasingly do not seem to fear U.S. retaliation for any planned assaults. Instead, al-Qaeda franchises expect Americans to adopt their new pill-bug mode of curling up until danger passes.

Our enemies have grounds for such cockiness. President Obama promised swift punishment for those who attacked U.S. installations in Benghazi and killed four Americans. So far the killers roam free. Rumors abound that they have been seen publicly in Libya.

Instead of blaming radical Islamist killers for that attack, the Obama reelection campaign team fobbed the assault off as the reaction to a supposedly right-wing, Islamophobic videomaker. That yarn was untrue and was greeted as politically correct appeasement in the Middle East.

All these Libyan developments took place against a backdrop of “lead from behind.” Was it wise for American officials to brag that the world’s largest military had taken a subordinate role in removing Moammar Qaddafi — in a military operation contingent on approval from the United Nations and the Arab League but not the U.S. Congress?

No one knows what to do about the mess in Syria. But when you do not know what to do, it is imprudent to periodically lay down “red lines.” Yet the administration has done just that to the Bashar al-Assad regime over the last two years.

In a similar vein, the administration has so far issued serial “deadlines” to the Iranians to cease the production of weapons-grade uranium. They don’t seem much worried about yet another deadline.

In Egypt, the United States went from abandoning ally and crook Hosni Mubarak to welcoming the freely elected and anti-American Muslim Brotherhood. Now, we are both praising and damning the military junta that overthrew President Mohamed Morsi. Do we still call that “the Arab Spring”? Is a junta still a junta, a coup still a coup?

Our entire anti-terrorism agenda is a paradox. Obama ran for office on the promise of shutting down Guantanamo Bay, curbing the Patriot Act, and ending renditions, preventive detention, and drone attacks. Then, in office, he went both hot and cold on all of them.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder hinted at trying accused terrorist killers such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in civilian courts and holding CIA interrogators legally responsible for enhanced interrogations. Then, the administration abruptly dropped those bad ideas and embraced or expanded many of the Bush-Cheney anti-terrorism protocols — and in many cases went far beyond anything envisioned by the prior administration.

These paradoxes were not lost on our terrorist enemies. The successors to Osama bin Laden apparently guessed that the Obama administration might not like America’s anti-terrorism policies any more than the terrorists themselves did.

News that the FBI scrutinized and then apparently forgot about unhinged Islamists such as Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Major Nidal Malik Hasan sent the wrong message to terrorists. Was the Obama administration more worried about hurting feelings than it was concerned to prevent further attacks?

Other rivals and enemies are now fully aware of our new pill-bug mode in the Middle East — and are willing to bet that it might apply everywhere. Without apparent worry over the U.S. reaction, Russia has given tentative asylum as a reward to Edward Snowden, who singlehandedly exposed — and sabotaged — a vast National Security Agency spying network. Increasingly, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan seem to be on their own with a bullying China, unsure whether to bend or resist.

Meanwhile, the new American pill bug curls up in hopes that the mounting dangers will just go away.

http://nationalreview.com/article/355269/america-pill-bug-victor-davis-hanson

The suspicious leaks behind the terrorism alert

Even If Edward Snowden's leaks have caused irreparable harm to national security, those of us without security clearances only have the government's word to take for it. But this week's disclosure that a specific conference call between al Qaeda leaders was detected and recorded by the National Security Agency is precisely the sort of information that should not be in the public domain until the threat has passed, precisely the sort of secret that almost no one has a problem with the government keeping.

If it's true that al Qaeda leaders change their communication tactics to find a way around the NSA dragnet, they sure as hell are going to avoid the same circuits that somehow tapped this conference call.  They're going to do it before the immediate threat has passed, too, meaning that the NSA will lose a real-time source of intelligence that might have provided further information about the target of the planned attack. Initially, several news outlets reported simply that the U.S. had detected "chatter" about an attack. Then, McClatchy added some detail, reporting the names of several al Qaeda leaders, including Nasser al-Wuhayshi, who participated in the discussion. Then, Eli Lake reported that the discussions had taken place on a specific conference call. (See Marcy Wheeler's timeline for more.)
The number of people who would be cleared to possess the level of detail that identified a particular conference call as the relevant SIGINT activity is tiny. It is one thing to say broadly that U.S. officials overheard "discussions," because someone planning an attack probably discusses it in some way many times. Even then, though, you could imagine a mad scramble by jihadists for new communication safe zones.

There are two reasons why the government would tolerate this type of leak. One: The threat was so severe that the only way to prevent it was to expose the plot completely, showing al Qaeda that the U.S. had penetrated so deeply into their organization that the big boss's double-top-secret conference call was recorded. It's the counter-terrorism equivalent of face up poker. There's an element of brinksmanship in this approach.

Two: The U.S. intelligence community might want al Qaeda to shift its communication methods because the new method al Qaeda ends up with might be more intercept-friendly in the future, or the U.S. believes that certain al Qaeda members it keeps under constant surveillance will help them quickly figure out the new method.

Note that several early articles referred to the (Yemeni) interception of a courier, which might — might — mean that the U.S. got its hands on a copy of the tape and does NOT have al Qaeda pinned to the wall. IF the U.S knew where the conference call took place, they ostensibly have a very good bead on Ayman al-Zawahiri's head, too.

Or, the leaks could be completely unauthorized.

If another big, bad leak investigation is soon, ah, leaked, then we'll know. Until then, let's just say that something doesn't look quite right.

http://theweek.com/article/index/248020/the-suspicious-leaks-behind-the-terrorism-alert

Civil rights activists remain silent on Florida school bus beating video

A viral video showing the beating of a 13-year-old white boy by three African-American youths in Florida has left hundreds of thousands of viewers horrified, but critics say the case doesn't seem to be attracting much sympathy from self-styled civil rights activists.

In the chilling video, three 15-year-old boys repeatedly beat and kick a victim police said was left with a broken arm and two black eyes. 

Although Florida came under fire in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting and George Zimmerman's acquittal by activists Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson - who called it an "apartheid state" - neither has spoken publicly about the bus incident. But one reason the case has not become as racially charged as other attacks may be that many news outlets have either not shown the first few seconds, before the victim goes down behind a seat, and others blur out his face to the point his race is no longer apparent.

The bus driver, 64-year-old John Moody, can be heard frantically calling a radio dispatcher for help, although he was criticized in some quarters for not physically intervening.

"No, you've got to get somebody here quick, quick, quick," Moody pleads on his phone as the assailants take turns landing windmill punches and vicious kicks on the cowering victim. "They about to beat this boy to death over here."

"They about to beat this boy to death over here."

- Florida bus driver John Moody

The attack took place July 9 in the St. Petersburg-area community of Gulfport. But the horrific cell phone and surveillance video only came out only recently. Police say the three youths, all African-American, attacked the boy after he told officials at their dropout prevention school that one of them had tried to sell him marijuana.

Most of the focus has so far been on Moody, who retired two weeks after the incident. Moody went on CNN earlier this week to defend himself.

"Me jumping in the middle of that fight with three boys, it would have been more dangerous for other students on the bus for as myself," he told Morgan. "There's just no telling what might have happened."

Moody stopped the bus, and police said the suspects used the emergency exit of the bus to escape. Joshua Reddin, Julian McKnight, and Lloyd Khemradj, all 15 years old, were arrested a short time later. All three were charged with aggravated battery and have since been released. Reddin is also charged with unarmed robbery.

Pinellas County school policy does not require a driver to intervene and prosecutors have said Moody will not face charges, but Gulfport Police Chief Robert Vincent told WFLA that Moody should have stepped in.
"There was clearly an opportunity for him to intervene and or check on the welfare of the children or the child in this case, and he didn't make any effort to do so," Vincent said.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/08/07/florida-school-bus-beatdown-goes-unnoticed-by-self-styled-civil-rights/?test=latestnews#ixzz2bO6bTbQt

Associated Press Reporter Accused of Covering Up Obama’s Geography Gaffe – See The Evidence

So how did the mainstream media report the presidential screw-up that would have embarrassed a beauty queen?

Associated Press reporter Russ Bynum seemed to covered for the president by correcting the gaffe in his story that was carried in papers and online across the country.

First, here is the actual text of the exchange between Obama and Leno (taken from the White House transcript):

LENO:  You mentioned infrastructure.  Why is that a partisan issue?  I live in a town, the bridge is falling apart, it’s not safe.  How does that become Republican or Democrat?  How do you not just fix the bridge?  (Laughter and applause.)

THE PRESIDENT:  I don’t know.  As you know, for the last three years, I’ve said, let’s work together.  Let’s find a financing mechanism and let’s go ahead and fix our bridges, fix our roads, sewer systems, our ports.  The Panama is being widened so that these big supertankers can come in.  Now, that will be finished in 2015.  If we don’t deepen our ports all along the Gulf — places like Charleston, South Carolina, or Savannah, Georgia, or Jacksonville, Florida — if we don’t do that, those ships are going to go someplace else.  And we’ll lose jobs.  Businesses won’t locate here.

Bynum (who lives in Savannah, one of the three oceanfront cities incorrectly identified by the President as “along the Gulf”) wrote a story about the “Tonight Show” interview but made a critical addition to the story (in parenthesis below):

“If we don’t deepen our ports all along the Gulf — (and in) places like Charleston, S.C., or Savannah, Ga., or Jacksonville, Fla. — if we don’t do that, these ships are going to go someplace else and we’ll lose jobs,” Obama said.

A screen shot of how the article appeared over at the Charlotte Observer:

S

creen shot of Russ Bynum’s story on Obama’s Leno appearance that appears to cover his geography gaffe. (Source: Charlotte Observer)

By adding the parenthetical (and in), the gaffe magically disappears. It’s a fact that was not lost on the ever-watchful Michelle Malkin:

Image: Twitter

Ms. Malkin also reminded the AP that they were quick to point out geography gaffes when Sarah Palin made them, but don’t mind covering for Obama.

Tom Blumer at Newsbusters points out that Bynum’s Twitter profile claims that he is “nobody’s fool.” Blumer “begs to differ.”

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/08/08/associated-press-reporter-accused-of-covering-up-obamas-geography-gaffe-see-the-evidence/

Is Obama Playing a Shell Game with Housing?

Barack Obama has finally started talking about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac again, years after insisting that reforming the two mortgage giants would be a top priority.  But is the President serious about finally resolving the risk facing taxpayers, or is he just suggesting that Congress play a shell game with it?

It has been nearly five years since the collapse of the housing bubble in the US nearly caused financial systems across the globe to collapse, setting up fears of a run on the banks and the vaporization of trillions of dollars in capital.  A panicked Congress passed the first of two sweeping appropriations that Treasury used as a blank check to stopgap the American banking and financial sectors in October 2008. 

Much of the funds went to bail out the government-sponsored enterprises, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which between the two held over $5 trillion in mortgage securities that suddenly looked nearly worthless. The two GSEs were supposed to be financially independent of the federal government, but the bailout saddled taxpayers with huge losses from both.

To this day, that remains the case.  Taxpayers poured $154 billion into the two GSEs, and have only started to see a trickle of cash return recently.  Ever since the decision to conduct a taxpayer-funded rescue of Fannie and Freddie, politicians of both parties have demanded reforms that would either restrict their ability to rely on government subsidies or go entirely private to eliminate future risk to both the financial markets and to taxpayers.

Yet as we near the five-year mark of their rescue, the Obama administration and three successive sessions of Congress have done nothing whatsoever to deal with the risk posed by Fannie and Freddie.  The rational time for that effort would have come three years ago, when President Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats Barney Frank and Chris Dodd proposed sweeping legislative reform of the financial sector.  

The bill known as Dodd-Frank passed in the summer of 2010 and purported to put an end to “too big to fail” policies, but mostly imposed new fees and regulations on trading while doing nothing about either the two GSEs or the size of the financial institutions that required bailing out two years earlier.  

In fact, the bill created a mechanism whereby taxpayers would front the cash to unwind large-scale failures through the FDIC and wait up to five years to get repaid, legitimizing the 2008 actions ex post facto.  When asked why their bill failed to address either the GSEs or “too big to fail,” then Senator Chris Dodd admitted, “What we did … was fairly anemic in light of what we need to be doing.” 

At the time, the White House claimed that overhauling the crippled GSEs would be a priority for 2011. Instead, they have remained silent on the failed entities, even while both Republicans and Democrats have repeatedly called for a resolution to the risk facing taxpayers – and a conclusion to the kind of government intervention that touched off the crisis in the first place.  

The lack of initiative has frustrated players in the lending markets such as Wells Fargo CEO Robert Kovacevich, who demanded action on the problem seven months ago.  “If it wasn’t for Fannie and Freddie, [the mortgage crisis] would have been a small problem. Fannie and Freddie and other government agencies guaranteed 70 percent of those [bad] mortgages,” Kovacevich told CNBC’s Squawk Box at the time. He warned that the public-private hybrid GSEs would create more mischief if left in place, and recommended instead that the Federal Housing Administration should take on any government role in home loans, where political manipulation of loan approvals had mainly been avoided.

After waiting years, President Obama returned to the Fannie and Freddie issue this week.  Appearing in Phoenix as part of his tour on economic policy, Obama called for the privatization of mortgage lending by winding down the crippled GSEs once and for all. 

“First, private capital should take a bigger role in the mortgage market… I actually believe in the free market,” Obama told the press. “Private lending should be the backbone of the housing market."  He declared his support in concept for a bipartisan bill already moving in the Senate to unwind Fannie and Freddie, and urged Congress to find ways to strengthen the private markets to ensure broader but safer lending.

That the White House has finally taken some notice of the lingering wrecks of the 2008 collapse is encouraging.  However, Obama proposes to get rid of Fannie and Freddie while transferring the government’s ability to distort the mortgage markets to the FHA.  “We’ve got to keep housing affordable for first-time homebuyers,” Obama said, “[a]nd that means we've got to strengthen the FHA so it gives today’s families the same kind of chance it gave my grandparents to buy a home.”

The FHA began that process in 2009 as borrowers flocked to its doors after the GSEs went into government receivership, and the results are less than encouraging.  FHA’s former chief credit officer Edward Pinto wrote last November that the FHA’s capital position turned negative nearly overnight, and that the FHA itself might need its own taxpayer bailout.  The FY2012 actuarial study showed that the single-family program’s valuation dropped $23 billion in a year when the housing markets improved significantly, a serious red flag about the stability of its operation.  

“If it were a private company,” Pinto warned, “it would be shut down.”  Strengthening the FHA sounds suspiciously like a bailout to keep the path of intervention open in order to keep pursuing the kind of home-ownership political goals that shipwrecked Fannie and Freddie.

The Heritage Foundation raises another red flag on another part of the President’s proposal. Obama wants government to insure mortgage-backed securities (MBS) from home loans, funded by levying fees on investors.  The implication from this is that the guarantees would be self-funded, involving no taxpayer risk.  “But if a reinsurance guarantee is self-funding,” Heritage’s John Ligon and James Gattuso ask, “then why is the government needed?” 

Surely that role should be filled by private-sector insurers who can compete on price and assess risk separately from political policies and agendas that have little to do with solvency--if the cost of the guarantees truly covers the costs of failures.  A government guarantee would ensure only that Washington retains its ability to distort the lending markets – and put taxpayers on the hook for failures in the MBS market just as it did with Fannie and Freddie.  

Anyone who believes that the revenue from the sale of guarantees would sit around in a lockbox to avoid taxpayer bailouts isn’t paying much attention to the Social Security fund.

Rather than simply swap Fannie and Freddie for the FHA and continue to have the government guarantee loans, we need to unwind the government’s ability to intervene in mortgage lending altogether.  Private lenders should assume the risks of their own investments, which should incentivize them to be more careful than they were in the last decade, when they assumed – correctly – that the federal government would take ownership of GSEs in a crisis. 
Government should regulate to prevent fraud, theft, and ensure proper levels of capitalization, a task that they haven’t been able to fulfill in their own operation at FHA.  The President has taken a good first step by putting Fannie and Freddie reform back on the table, but let’s produce real reform rather than a repeat of the same mistakes that created the crisis in the first place.

http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2013/08/08/Is-Obama-Playing-a-Shell-Game-with-Housing.aspx#page1

AP: Small businesses look at axing family coverage when ObamaCare hits

As the ObamaCare mandates approach — even those purportedly postponed — employers are looking for ways to get around the ballooning costs of insurance for their employees.  Larger employers can spread the costs out better and negotiate lower rates, but smaller businesses have fewer options for retaining their benefits.  The Associated Press reports that many smaller businesses may abandon paid dependent coverage, forcing employees to bear the whole cost, especially for spouses:

One casualty of the new health care law may be paid coverage for families of people who work for small businesses.

Insurance companies have already warned small business customers that premiums could rise 20 percent or more in 2014 under the Affordable Care Act. That’s making some owners consider not paying for coverage for workers’ families, even though insurance is a benefit that helps companies attract and retain top talent. If more small business owners decide to stop paying for family coverage, it will accelerate a trend that started as the cost of health insurance soared in recent years. …
Premiums have been soaring for years because of the rising cost of medical care. But the ACA also has requirements that may drive premiums higher, including a tax on insurance companies that is expected to be passed along to employers. Shoop’s insurer has warned that the tax could send his premiums up more than 20 percent a year from now.

“It’s going to be very significant,” Shoop says. “We’re really going to have to do a juggling act, and so are our employees.”

The ACA requires businesses with 50 or more employees provide coverage to their workers — but family coverage is a different matter.  The mandate requires that employers offer insurance coverage for dependent children (now through age 26, which may be a driver of the increase as well), but does not require employers to cover the cost of that insurance.  Spouses don’t even get that much; the law does not require employers to include them at all, even at the full cost to the employee.  That will send them into the individual exchanges, if employers have to restrict their expenditures enough — and that means more federal outlays for subsidies, and a quicker pace to the barrels of red ink that ObamaCare will produce.

So far, the argument goes that market forces for labor will force employes of all sizes under the mandate to offer health insurance, but that’s a matter of faith rather than reason.  Smaller businesses already have trouble competing against larger businesses on benefits packages. They make up for it with better workplace environments, more satisfying work, upward mobility opportunities, or simply a way to pad the resumé for better jobs in the future.

The bottom line works in this regard, too — and if a few businesses gain an advantage on costs (which then gives them a competitive advantage on price for their products and services), their competition will soon follow, and unpaid dependent coverage will become the norm rather than the exception for all but the largest companies.  For that matter, the fines for non-coverage of employees will exceed the costs of coverage, so the entire exercise will become a waiting period to see how quickly the dam breaks rather than if. Dependent coverage may simply be the first major crack.

At least one group of employees won’t have to worry about this.  Why not?  Well, they work for the people who imposed this mess on the rest of us, so they get a pass:

The White House on Wednesday released the legal details behind its ObamaCare bailout for Members of Congress and their staffs, and if anything this rescue is worse than last week’s leaks suggested: Illegal dispensations for the ruling class, different rules for the hoi polloi.

Thanks to an amendment from Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley that Democrats enacted in 2010, the Affordable Care Act says that “the only health plans that the Federal Government may make available” to Congress are the ones offered on the ObamaCare insurance exchanges. But Members and many aides have been flipping out because they won’t qualify for ObamaCare subsidies and they’ll lose employer contributions they now receive under the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, or FEHBP, which picks up about three-quarters of the average premium.

At President Obama’s personal request, the Office of Personnel Management decreed that the Members don’t have to get off the gravy train after all. The eat-your-own-cooking provision begins with the phrase “Notwithstanding any other provision of law.” The feds now interpret that clause as a loophole to mean that the Affordable Care Act did not change the 1959 law that created the FEHBP.
Since Members and staff still technically meet the definition of federal employees qualified for the FEHBP, the Administration says they’re still entitled to enroll in the FEHBP concurrently with the exchanges. The feds then “clarify”—their euphemism—that the regulatory meaning of health benefits in the FEHBP can be ObamaCare plans. Voila, taxpayers will continue to chip in $4,900 for individual and $10,000 for family coverage.

Normally, the WSJ explains, Congress includes the “Not withstanding” language to declare a bill’s primacy over existing legislation.  This takes the curious, and self-serving, position that Congress meant to pass a bill that has no effect in relation to the FEHBP, even though Grassley’s amendment plainly meant the opposite.  It would be interesting to see how a federal court would rule on this interpretation, but I’m not sure who has standing to sue in this case.  Perhaps, oh, 300 million other taxpayers who just got relegated to second-class status by the White House?  Or maybe just the children?

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/08/08/ap-small-businesses-look-at-axing-family-coverage-when-obamacare-hits/

NSA snooping far more intense than previously thought

As each revelation about NSA snooping is published, you have to wonder where the bottom is on this scandal.

In truth, we're nowhere near it yet.

The New York Times is reporting that the NSA is vacuuming up huge amounts of data collected from Americans who send emails overseas and Americans overseas who send emails back home. No warrant, of course, and that 2008 FISA "reform" statute, where the NSA says they get the authority, is looking worse all the time.

The National Security Agency is searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans' e-mail and text communications into and out of the country, hunting for people who mention information about foreigners under surveillance, according to intelligence officials.
The N.S.A. is not just intercepting the communications of Americans who are in direct contact with foreigners targeted overseas, a practice that government officials have openly acknowledged. It is also casting a far wider net for people who cite information linked to those foreigners, like a little used e-mail address, according to a senior intelligence official.
While it has long been known that the agency conducts extensive computer searches of data it vacuums up overseas, that it is systematically searching - without warrants - through the contents of Americans' communications that cross the border reveals more about the scale of its secret operations.
It also adds another element to the unfolding debate, provoked by the disclosures of Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor, about whether the agency has infringed on Americans' privacy as it scoops up e-mails and phone data in its quest to ferret out foreign intelligence.
Government officials say the cross-border surveillance was authorized by a 2008 law, the FISA Amendments Act, in which Congress approved eavesdropping on domestic soil without warrants as long as the "target" was a noncitizen abroad. Voice communications are not included in that surveillance, the senior official said.
[...]
"In carrying out its signals intelligence mission, N.S.A. collects only what it is explicitly authorized to collect," she said. "Moreover, the agency's activities are deployed only in response to requirements for information to protect the country and its interests."

"Explicitly authorized"? Not hardly. It is the NSA's interpretation of the law that is at issue. And the loose interpretation of "requirements for information to protect the country and its interests" is a familiar dodge used by intel agencies to justify surveillance.

The explanation of how this program works is chilling:

To conduct the surveillance, the N.S.A. is temporarily copying and then sifting through the contents of what is apparently most e-mails and other text-based communications that cross the border. The senior intelligence official, who, like other former and current government officials, spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic, said the N.S.A. makes a "clone of selected communication links" to gather the communications, but declined to specify details, like the volume of the data that passes through them.
Computer scientists said that it would be difficult to systematically search the contents of the communications without first gathering nearly all cross-border text-based data; fiber-optic networks work by breaking messages into tiny packets that flow at the speed of light over different pathways to their shared destination, so they would need to be captured and reassembled.
The official said that a computer searches the data for the identifying keywords or other "selectors" and stores those that match so that human analysts could later examine them. The remaining communications, the official said, are deleted; the entire process takes "a small number of seconds," and the system has no ability to perform "retrospective searching."
The official said the keyword and other terms were "very precise" to minimize the number of innocent American communications that were flagged by the program. At the same time, the official acknowledged that there had been times when changes by telecommunications providers or in the technology had led to inadvertent overcollection. The N.S.A. monitors for these problems, fixes them and reports such incidents to its overseers in the government, the official said.

I don't know about you but I am so relieved that after "accidentally" collecting my data, the NSA reports to its "government overseers." What are they going to do about it after the fact? Send me an email apologizing for snooping?
Congress should take a second look at that 2008 FISA law and either deep six it or fix it. Give these guys an inch and they take a mile.

 http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/08/nsa_snooping_far_more_intense_than_previously_thought.html#ixzz2bP6fm2CR

Climate Realism and Socialist Realism

Louis Fischer, born in 1896 in Philadelphia, was a journalist who became a supporter and believer in the Soviet Union and world communism. He lived in Moscow for many years. In an essay in The God That Failed Fischer describes how in the middle 1930's the Soviets ordered all writers to "treat the present as though it did not exist and the future as if it had already arrived." That became known as Socialist Realism. Russian workers who lived in poverty and shared a single room with other families were depicted as well fed, smiling and happy. That was the communist depiction of the future, a future that never arrived.
Socialist Realism was promotion of fantasy for political reasons. The present did not live up to the enthusiastic promises and predictions that accompanied the founding of the communist state. Rather than admit error, the supporters constructed a mental fantasy world. The promises would still come true, but they would be delayed for understandable reasons. In the meantime they pretended the promises had already come true.


The U.S. Department of Energy has a plan to reduce the cost of solar power by a factor of 4 by 2020 with the hope that solar would increase from .05% of our power to 14% by 2030. The motivation is, of course, to reduce emissions of CO2. This is Climate Realism, very similar to Socialist Realism. Not only does solar power, at the plant gate, cost 4-8 times as much as conventional power, but it is erratic and seasonal to say nothing of not working at night. It also needs to be placed in the southwest where there is a lot of sunshine. This leads to needing storage of electricity, or perhaps storage of heat for certain types of solar. The only practical and efficient way of storing electricity is pumped storage, or two lakes at very different altitudes with a reversible hydroelectric plant connecting them. Then you need extra long, very high voltage power lines to bring the electricity from the southwest deserts to the cloudy cities of the Midwest and East. The Department of Energy is spinning a fantasy. Most of the cost of solar power is in pedestrian things like steel and concrete. Even if the cost of photovoltaic panels were zero, solar would not be remotely competitive. If complete solar plants cost zero, it would still not be practicable due to the cost of backup plants, electricity storage and long power lines.
The next part of the fantasy is electric cars. Electric cars are impracticable because batteries cost too much, take too long to charge, wear out too quickly, and weigh too much for the amount of electricity they can hold. Electric cars are desired because they can replace fossil fuel with electricity from solar and wind -- no CO2 emissions! The Nissan Leaf is a semi-practical electric car. It costs $35,000, the battery takes 12 hours to recharge and it can go about 60-80 miles before running out of electricity. The battery weighs about 600 pounds and provides about as much driving range as 10 pounds of gasoline. The battery loses capacity over time depending on how the car is driven. For $100 a month Nissan has a program that provides replacement batteries as needed. For that amount of money you could buy enough gasoline to drive 10,000 or 15,000 miles a year. Plug-in hybrid cars, like the Chevy Volt, are electric cars with a battery good for about 30 miles and a backup gasoline or diesel engine to take over when the battery runs out of juice. Hybrid cars are cars with a small battery, good for about 1 mile, that recycles energy otherwise lost to braking, resulting in better fuel economy. Hybrid cars are actually practical, unlike their big battery brothers. The government subsidizes electric cars and forces manufacturers to offer them by various quotas.
As an exercise in Climate Realism, government is sponsoring a 5-5-5 project at the Argonne National Lab near Chicago for $120 million. The objective is to produce a battery 5 times cheaper with 5 times the energy density in 5 years. It should be the 5-5-5-5 plan, the last 5 being a 5-minute recharge. This is strongly reminiscent of Soviet 5 year plans. In the unlikely event that this fantasy succeeds, the scientists should be awarded not just a Nobel Prize. They should be given the entire corpus of the Nobel estate.
I attended a global warming expo in Miami where a knowledgeable professor assured me that work was under way at MIT to produce huge battery breakthroughs, based on nanotechnology, in 18 months. That was about 6 years ago.
I hesitate to even mention the next fantasy. I'm not sure that the global warming people are even serious about it. It may just be a diversion to fool the coal industry into thinking that they are not on death row. I speak of carbon sequestration. The idea is that the CO2 coming from the smokestack of a coal electric generating plant will be captured, cooled, compressed, and pumped into porous underground formations where it will be sequestered forever. The power required is on the order of 20% of the plant's output. Either the plant has to be fed with pure oxygen or the CO2 has to be separated from the nitrogen in the smokestack. Nitrogen is too incompressible to sequester along with the CO2. Most of the stack gases are nitrogen from the combustion air. If this is not enough to kill coal, then consider that if one of the injection wells starts leaking, it could dump enough CO2 into the local air to suffocate entire towns, something that has actually happened in Africa when lakes suddenly released large amounts of CO2. Nevertheless, the Department of Energy has a large carbon sequestration program.
A very obvious fantasy is the idea that if we, the United States, reduce emissions of CO2 it will accomplish something. Even if you believe in global warming it is hard to see how you could believe in this fantasy. The problem is that even if we were reduce our emissions to zero the effect would be minimal because China, India, and many other countries are rapidly increasing their emissions, thereby negating all our earnest efforts. Our CO2 emissions are 5.6 billion metric tons per year, 18% of the total, but Asia and Oceania generate 14.2 billion tons and their emissions are rapidly growing. Ours will be shrinking due to increased use of natural gas. If we cut our emissions greatly it will severely damage the economy and have no important effect on climate according the warmers own theories. When I mention this to believers in global warming they usually say we should set a good example for the Chinese. Maybe we can shame them into following our instructions on fighting global warming.
According to the preachers of global warming, the science behind predictions of climate doom is solid and settled. But, the supposed source of authoritative climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) does not even make predictions. They craftily make projections. A prediction is a statement about what you think will happen in the future. A projection is what is spit out of a computer model when you input guesses about future emissions. And, get this; the different computer models disagree with each other about those projections, by a lot. The IPCC fixes this by simply taking an average of the projections of the many computer models. They are breaking new ground in mathematical statistics, an opinion poll of computers. This is called a multi-model ensemble (that's French) and it is dressed up in a lot of fancy mathematics.
I've barely scratched the surface of global warming fantasy. Unfortunately the human mind easily become fixated on an idea, and once fixated, evidence and facts have little or no effect. You need social pressure or outright brainwashing to clear out the cobwebs.

 http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/08/climate_realism_and_socialist_realism.html#ixzz2bPTdLNqs