The GrassCity Gazette

[AK Infinity]

April 15, 2009

1,500 farmers commit mass suicide in India

Over 1,500 farmers in an Indian state committed suicide after being driven to debt by crop failure, it was reported today.

The agricultural state of Chattisgarh was hit by falling water levels.

"The water level has gone down below 250 feet here. It used to be at 40 feet a few years ago," Shatrughan Sahu, a villager in one of the districts, told Down To Earth magazine

"Most of the farmers here are indebted and only God can save the ones who do not have a bore well."

Mr Sahu lives in a district that recorded 206 farmer suicides last year. Police records for the district add that many deaths occur due to debt and economic distress.

In another village nearby, Beturam Sahu, who owned two acres of land was among those who committed suicide. His crop is yet to be harvested, but his son Lakhnu left to take up a job as a manual labourer.

His family must repay a debt of £400 and the crop this year is poor.

"The crop is so bad this year that we will not even be able to save any seeds," said Lakhnu's friend Santosh. "There were no rains at all."

"That's why Lakhnu left even before harvesting the crop. There is nothing left to harvest in his land this time. He is worried how he will repay these loans."

Bharatendu Prakash, from the Organic Farming Association of India, told the Press Association: "Farmers' suicides are increasing due to a vicious circle created by money lenders. They lure farmers to take money but when the crops fail, they are left with no option other than death."

Mr Prakash added that the government ought to take up the cause of the poor farmers just as they fight for a strong economy.

"Development should be for all. The government blames us for being against development. Forest area is depleting and dams are constructed without proper planning.

All this contributes to dipping water levels. Farmers should be taken into consideration when planning policies," he said.

This article is from The Belfast Telegraph

1,500 farmers commit mass suicide in India - Asia, World - The Independent

[MountyBounty]

Exercise your 4th amendment rights??? This is what happens. Pastor got beat down/ 11 stitches + tazed mulitple times.

YouTube - Baptist pastor beaten + tazed by Border...

[aaronman]

Obama will not prosecute CIA torturers

The White House has announced that CIA operatives, including contractors, who followed Bush guidelines for torturing prisoners will not be prosecuted for these actions, regardless of the Obama administration’s position on the legality of the techniques they used. “[I]t is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution,” President Obama said in a statement released today. This seems to be part of a deal struck with the CIA over the release of several torture memos today and it is a victory for Bush administration lawyers who sought to provide legal cover for US government torture.

The Washington Post also reported:

For the first time, officials said that they would provide legal representation at no cost to CIA employees in international tribunals or U.S. congressional inquiries into alleged torture. They also said they would indemnify agency workers against any possible financial judgments.

“It would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the Justice Department,” Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement.

The ACLU was quick to shoot back at Obama’s announcement. “President Obama’s assertion that there should not be prosecutions of government officials who may have committed crimes before a thorough investigation has been carried out is simply untenable. Enforcing the nation’s laws should not be a political decision,” said Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the ACLU.

This comes as the White House released the three “Bradbury” memos, drafted in 2005, detailing CIA ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques and torture. The administration has also reportedly released a 2002 memo written by Justice Department lawyer John Yoo and signed by Jay Bybee. The New York Times described that memo as “a legal authorization for a laundry list of proposed C.I.A. interrogation techniques.”

The Bradbury memos are named for Steven Bradbury, the former acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel under Bush.

The decision apparently came “after a tense internal debate,” culminating with a “final round of deliberations” Wednesday night over the release, which was fiercely opposed by the CIA, which said their release would threaten national security. The administration faced a deadline of today for the release of the documents under a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union. The Bybee memo was put on the table April 2 as part of a negotiation between the ACLU and the White House after the Justice Department asked for a delay of two weeks to make a decision on releasing the Bradbury memos.

“These memos provide yet more incontrovertible evidence that Bush administration officials at the highest level of government authorized and gave legal blessings to acts of torture that violate domestic and international law,” said Romero.

There has been much speculation in recent days that the White House may release redacted versions of the memos, which sparked protests from the ACLU and other civil liberties groups and activists. Refusing to release the memos was also opposed by some administration officials, including Attorney General Holder, who reportedly supported a more complete release. In releasing the documents, Obama cited “exceptional circumstances” compelling him to release them and a desire to correct “erroneous and inflammatory assumptions” about US actions.

The White House released the memos with redactions, but apparently not on a scale some in the administration—and certainly the CIA—had originally wanted. The release, therefore, appears to be a victory. But, the apparent deal not to prosecute CIA torturers makes it a very sour victory. As the ACLU’s Romero said, “There can be no more excuses for putting off criminal investigations of officials who authorized torture, lawyers who justified it and interrogators who broke the law. No one is above the law, and the law must be equally enforced. Accountability is necessary for any functioning democracy and for restoring America’s reputation at home and abroad.”

[aaronman]

Barack Obama reveals George Bush's 'torture' techniques

The US government released four memos written by the Justice Department in 2002 and 2005 to provide legal cover for methods that have been widely criticised as torture and which the new president has already disowned.

They exposed in graphic detail how 28 al-Qaeda suspects were questioned at CIA secret prisons, revealing the use of forced nudity, facial and abdominal slaps and the use of confined space and "stress positions".

They considered locking suspects in a box with an insect which they claimed was a stinging insect.

The documents were released in response to a writ by the American Civil Liberties Union. It was the first time official details of such techniques had been released.

In a statement, the President said the tactics adopted by the previous administration in the "war on terror" in the wake of the September 11 attacks on America "undermine our moral authority and do not make us safer".

He however ruled that the agents who carried out the interrogations would not be prosecuted, as they had acted within the controversial guidelines.
Mr Obama said "it would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America" for conduct sanctioned by the Justice Department.

[Dickie4:20]

Thursday, April 16, 2009


Layoffs dipped last week but there is little comfort in this as the number is still at a level that seems good only compared to recent weeks. Worse still; the total number of unemployed continued to climb; setting an all time record. Foreclosure numbers have skyrocketed and we are yet to get into the big numbers as the ARM resets expected from the glut of really bad sub prime mortgages from two years ago start to kick in. Add to this the millions of people who have lost their middle class jobs and are coming to terms with having burned through their savings and have no real prospect for a decent paying job.

President Obama should have a good understanding about the cause of this mess; as a community organizer before going to law school he worked to find jobs and retraining for people laid off because of the outsourcing of the US steel industry. Most of those people he went to bat for have been retrained four or five times since then as job after job is sent offshore or they have settled for a service sector job at a fraction of their former wages. Their prospects for retirement gone, health care iffy at best, savings and pensions gone. If they managed to hang on to their homes they may now find them worth less than they owe on them.

In short, the people whose plight inspired Obama to go to law school so that he could fight for them are much worse off now than they were then. This is because the outsourcing didn’t stop with industries like steel the way the conservative Democrats and Republicans assured us it would. But President Obama has surrounded himself with economic advisors that still maintain "free trade" is ultimately good for American workers. Obama says he wants better trained workers; there would be more slots open in trade schools if workers weren’t constantly being retrained for jobs that won’t last as long as the training.

The conservatives have always said America needs to be run like a business and that philosophy would fix everything. China is winning big time while we lose because they run their business like a country. Business in China serves the nation and more or less serves the people. In America the nation and its people serve business and we are being consumed by it. Obama needs to find advisors who have figured this out while there is still time.
Prairie2 News

[AugustWest]

Originally Posted by MountyBounty

Exercise your 4th amendment rights??? This is what happens. Pastor got beat down/ 11 stitches + tazed mulitple times.

YouTube - Baptist pastor beaten + tazed by Border patrol - 11 stitches

man.. that's scary shit!

i guess this took place near Yuma which is considered a "Constitution Free Zone" about 2/3 of the US population lives within that 100 mile border

[aaronman]

The United States: Too big to fail? Or too big to survive?
Antiwar.com

Speaking at one of many “tea party” anti-Washington protests held throughout the country on April 15, Texas Gov. Rick Perry touched on a theme that could, I believe, prefigure a growing trend in American politics – and, indeed, throughout the world. He hit all the partisan talking points that are so familiar to my readers that I won’t bother reiterating them, and then remarked that Texas is doing relatively better than some other states, in spite of the “federal budget mess.” According to the Dallas Morning News, at this point “some in his U.S. flag-waving audience shouted, ‘Secede!’” The Governor took up this theme in remarks to reporters afterward:

“There’s a lot of different scenarios. We’ve got a great union. There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that. But Texas is a very unique place, and we’re a pretty independent lot to boot.”

I can just hear the Obamaites railing on about the “extremism” and “paranoia” of the “wingnuts” – it’s the characteristic way these people deal with ideas, in spite of the pretensions to transcendence of Obama’s beyond-red-state-and-blue-state credo. In spite of the fact that “right” and “left” are about as relevant to the current situation as the seating arrangements of the French parliament in the 1800’s — from whence the terminology derives – if it comes from the “right,” the “left” is honor-bound to take up position on the other side of the barricades. That’s too bad, because a major public figure like Perry raising such an idea is more than just a partisan ploy: it’s a harbinger of things to come.

Regardless of whether one endorses or disdains the Governor’s particular complaints against the federal government, the point is that bigness – in the world of nation-states, as well as finance – is out, and smallness is in.
It’s no accident that the world’s biggest financial combines, along with the giant producers like GM, are in trouble: like the dinosaurs, their bigness – once an advantage – evolved into a fatal gigantism. In the economic realm, this condition distanced management from the market it was supposedly serving and set up these companies for the big crash. They are now claiming that they’re “too big to fail,” and therefore deserve government bailouts — yet their very size (and the hubris that went with it) is what caused them to fail in the first place.

A similar trend is evident in the realm of nation-states. Remember when no one imagined that the mighty Soviet Union was about to fall flat on its face and shatter into several dozen pieces? A few years before the Berlin Wall was toppled, the USSR, to all outward appearances, was a colossus firmly rooted in Eurasian soil, an empire that was all but unchallengeable given its formidable nuclear arsenal and world-spanning apparatus. Even as the Communist regime was rapidly rotting from within, the sense that history was on its side – that inexorable forces were pushing it forward – was reflected in the rhetoric not only of Communist officials, but in the mindset of their Western adversaries.

In the 1980s, less than a decade away from Communism’s final collapse, we were told that the Soviets were on the march, not only in Afghanistan but throughout what we used to call the “third world.” In Africa, as well as Central and South America, leftist insurgents aided by Moscow were rising up and challenging Western-backed governments, and anti-Communists here in the US were raising the alarm. The neocons, at that time, were howling that Reagan, in negotiating the INF treaty with the Russians, had sold us down the river. The Soviets, they averred, had for the first time a huge military advantage, which they were about to use to seal our doom – and then, with an abruptness that caught our own CIA, not to mention the neocons, quite by surprise, the Soviet Union was no more.

In a series of near-bloodless overturns, starting in Germany and winding up in Moscow, the signatories to the Warsaw Pact fell, one by one, in dizzyingly rapid succession, until the last domino to fall – the Kremlin itself – made an earth-shattering but strangely hollow sound as it crashed, like a tree that’s rotted all the way through.

The Russians aren’t the only ones who have felt the consequences of the new decentralism: China, too, is experiencing problems, not only in Tibet but also in its fractious and relatively wild Western region, where various non-Han minorities chafe under Beijing’s rule. Iraq is another example, of a different sort: a country that had its borders created by Western fiat, and is now faced with the problem of keeping an entirely artificial state entity in charge of a territory housing several separate (and often mutually antagonistic) “nations.” This is the case throughout Africa, as well, where a series of bloody secessionist wars and outright massacres have taken place.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent creation of dozens of independent “countries” based on the borders of the old “autonomous” Soviet “republics” — as drawn by Stalin and his successors — has created a host of conflicts: the Caucasus is teeming with groups who, for a number of historical and practical reasons, want to break away from the central state, and establish their own independent enclaves. Why shouldn’t they be allowed to do so? Ask our State Department, which still refuses to recognize or deal in any way with the South Ossetians, the Abkhazians, or the representatives of the Transdniester Republic, all of whom resent being forced into an arbitrary “union” with people who have historically oppressed them.

In the United States, the idea of succession is considered beyond the pale, and Gov. Perry will no doubt catch a lot of flack for his comments, but the reality is that big countries – and bigness, per se – are on the wane. The future belongs to smaller, more manageable and efficient units, whether political or economic, which can better navigate the troubled waters of the world economy.

As much as the know-it-all pundits will mock Perry’s raising of the Texas flag, a serious secession movement in the US, based on regionalist sentiment, is not all that hard to imagine. A nation is, after all, more than a state: it derives its identity from a common culture, one that is largely shared by all citizens, including not only language but a certain mindset rooted in custom and economic convenience. However, when this cohesion is lacking – when tax-eating states, say, are arrayed against tax-producing states; or, to put it another way, when red states come up against blue states – longstanding allegiances are called into question and old bonds begin to dissolve.

Is this how the American empire will end – an implosion on the home front, even as its armies advance across the face of Central Asia and take up their positions in Afghanistan and Pakistan? Given the history of the world since 1989, and especially in the context of the current economic meltdown, what happened to the old Soviet Union is not such an implausible scenario for us.

[MountyBounty]

Volkswagen introduces world’s most economical car

While we don’t have a great deal of information available at this stage, we do know that Volkswagen is set to reveal the world’s most economical non-hybrid car to shareholders attending the 42nd annual general meeting of Volkswagen AG in Hamburg.

The single-seater is capable of 0.91 litres per 100km (or 258mpg in the old measure) and can manage a top speed of 123km/h.

The prototype, as shown here, was built in conditions of such great secrecy that little more is known about the car, but we’ll be sure to keep you posted after next week’s meeting.

[MountyBounty]

Bill requires you to identify yourself at all times

Editor’s note: So much for probable cause and the Fourth Amendment. According to the Kolender v. Lawson ruling of 1983, a demand for ID constitutes a search. Hundreds of years of common law and the Bill of Rights are now being relegated to the memory hole.
Papers please!!

The Texas Senate has approved a bizarre measure which would require citizens to show some sort of identification to any police officer who demands it, at any time, for any reason, 1200 WOAI news reports. Currently, it is illegal for a person to give a false name to police, but there is no law rewiring a person to provide i.d. at an officer’s whim. And State Sen. Tommy Williams (R-The Woodlands) doesn’t like the sound of this bill.
“We still live in a free society,” he said. “I don’t want police officers to be able to pull you over and ask that you identify yourself.”
The bill would also require individuals to provide their date of birth and ‘residence address’ to police.

[AK Infinity]

April 17, 2009

Sarkozy Snipes at 'dim' Spanish PM and 'weak' Barack Obama



(Jason Reed/Reuters)


Nicolas Sarkozy and Barack Obama

Charles Bremner in Paris


The US President is weak, the Spanish leader is dim, the German Chancellor is clinging on to France’s coat-tails and the head of the European Commission is irrelevant.

That, at any rate, is the world according to President Sarkozy, who has spent the week airing his unvarnished opinions of Barack Obama and an array of international politicians — abruptly ending France’s honeymoon with the US and needling Washington on several strategic issues.

In the latest in a stream of accounts from the Élysée Palace, Mr Sarkozy was quoted yesterday as telling an all-party group of MPs that Mr Obama was inexperienced and indecisive. “Obama has a subtle mind, very clever and very charismatic,” the French President said. “But he was elected two months ago and had never run a ministry. There are a certain number of things on which he has no position. And he is not always up to standard on decision-making and efficiency.”

The US President had underperformed on climate change when they met, Mr Sarkozy said, according to an account of the MP’s session in the newspaper Libération. “I told him, ‘I don’t think that you have quite understood what we are doing on carbon dioxide’.”

Mr Sarkozy was apparently irked by media reports that Mr Obama had saved the day in London by persuading President Hu of China to reach a compromise with France over tax havens. Mr Sarkozy’s version is that he shamed Mr Obama into action, telling him: “You were elected to build a new world. Tax havens are the embodiment of the old world.”

Mr Sarkozy was also reported yesterday to have cracked a dubious joke about Europe’s “Obamamania”. According to L’Express news magazine, he mentioned Mr Obama’s planned visit to Normandy for the D-day anniversary in June, saying: “I am going to ask him to walk on the Channel, and he’ll do it.”

This jaundiced view of Mr Obama may have been prompted by the US President’s heartfelt welcome at the G20, Nato and EU summits. “The President is annoyed by what he sees as the naivety and the herd mentality of the media,” wrote Claude Askolovitch, a commentator close to the Élysée Palace.

The end of the short-lived Franco-American honeymoon also reflects a decision to swing France back towards its traditional role as counterbalance to US power, a shift that began with tension over the London economic summit. In the Élysée account Mr Sarkozy played the pivotal role as upholder of principle in the face of ineffectual US leadership. He had telephoned Gordon Brown on the eve of the summit and threatened not to turn up at all if the leaders refused his demand to name and shame tax havens, according to the leaks.

Although Mr Sarkozy has taken France back into full membership of the Nato alliance, over the past week he has picked various quarrels with Washington, demanding, for instance, a separate headquarters for a new European defence force — an idea opposed by Britain and the US. He has criticised Mr Obama for calling for Turkish membership of the EU.

Mr Sarkozy also turned his guns on his fellow Europeans. He told the assembled MPs that Spain’s Socialist Government had decided to stop advertising on state television — a year after he did the same for France. “You know who they cited as the example?” Mr Sarkozy asked.

When a Socialist MP interjected: “You can say a lot of things about [José Luis Rodriguez] Zapatero . . .” Mr Sarkozy retorted: “Perhaps he’s not very clever — but I know people who were very clever and who did not make the second round of the presidential election.” That was a reference to Lionel Jospin, the former French Socialist leader who was knocked out by Jean-Marie Le Pen in the 2002 race.

Mr Sarkozy said that Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, had come round to his side on the economy at the G20 summit only when she realised that the German economy was in trouble. She “did not have any other choice but to rally to my position”, he said. José Manuel Barroso, the Portuguese President of the Commission, was described as “totally absent” from the G20 discussions.

He did, however, go on to extol the virtues of his favourite fellow leader. “The important thing in democracy is to be re-elected. Look at Berlusconi. He has been re-elected three times,” Mr Sarkozy said.

He also seems to have adopted Mr Berlusconi’s idea of tact. The Italian Prime Minister, who referred to Mr Obama as “suntanned”, used the same adjective while touring a makeshift school in L’Aquila yesterday. He said to a black priest: “My compliments, you are very suntanned,” and told a black boy: “I wish I had as much time to lie in the sun as you do.”


Sarkozy snipes at 'dim' Spanish PM and 'weak' Barack Obama - Times Online


[Ha ha ha... Ya gotta love those French folks. Well I guess it's back to condoms for those two.]

[Salvial]

Was Ron Paul, tea party re-inventor, right all along?


Ron Paul told us long ago. And so did the supporters of this one-time Libertarian presidential candidate.
Maybe you remember about 16 months ago the 11-term Texas Republican representative, who's now organized a new Campaign for Liberty, was raking in more political contributions each month than most other GOP presidential candidates, relying on his hundreds of thousands of fervent supporters staging their money bomb days of online donations and -- oh, yes – tea parties.
In many cases today’s media coverage of some 700+ tax protesting tea parties across the country ended up telling us more about the media than the rallies, which sure had some angry guests for “tea parties.”
Cable channels tended to cover and debate the events along their predictable viewership lines, with Fox News taking them seriously while acknowledging their critics, and MSNBC generally dismissing....


...them as lame organizing attempts by a gasping Republican party that opposes Obama on everything, except maybe perhaps shooting Somali pirates dead in the head.
Anyone monitoring varied blog comments and Twitter exchanges in recent days, however, recognizes the familiar grassroots flavor of the dedicated past Paulites in their chatrooms, exchanging organizing tips, alerting each other, making signs and alerting the media.
Many Republican politicians back home for the Easter recess, which seems to last well past the time that anyone else gets to mark that holiday, appeared to be playing catch-up, inviting themselves to the local rallies.
While some tried to portray the events as merely anti-tax rallies, pointing out that President Obama wants to cut taxes for 95% of Americans making under $250,000, feelings at these events included more varied angers, including Wall Street bailouts, huge spending plans, anticipated deficits and debts, and the general economic unease and uncertainty afflicting many Americans.
“We’re not happy with the stimulus. We’re not happy with earmarks. And we’re not happy with runaway spending,” said one tea party attendee, who opted against a Revolution-era costume.
Paul's liberty campaign today sought to remind folks of its role in the re-genesis of tea parties in 2007. But few noticed that e-mails and Tweets are already flying around about online planning of similar rallies on July 4th, Independence Day.
With more than one-third of all income earners already excluded from paying income taxes, the frustration and fervor among many who do pay seemed fed by the White House budget’s immense spending numbers and anticipated debt with more zeroes than most personal calculators can display.
The event, timed to April 15 tax filing day, did provide an organizing opportunity early in the Obama administration for conservative-minded voters who were otherwise overwhelmed in last November’s elections that produced a Democratic president and two Democrat-controlled houses of Congress.
The new Democratic administration did everything it could today to diminish the PR media impact of thousands of protesters across the country, including across the street from the White House, scheduling an Obama speech on taxes and simplifying the complex tax code, releasing the Obama and Biden family tax returns and making Press Secretary Robert Gibbs available live to laugh derisively with Ed Schultz on MSNBC over the pathetic rallies and the impossibility of them being in any way organic.
The question, of course, remains whether the grassroots organizers with complicit political allies can over time turn the anger into an actual effective political movement, as Howard Jarvis did with the anti-tax Prop. 13 in California years ago. And which party can most effectively tap into the protesters’ anger, using the new social networking methods that Obama’s campaign itself employed so well the last two years.
Meanwhile, since he proved so prescient last year about the approaching economic bust, here are some of Ron Paul’s recent thoughts on taxes and government spending, which, it may not surprise you to learn, he blames for much of the contemporary economic turmoil:
Could America exist without an income tax? The idea seems radical, yet in truth America did just fine without a federal income tax for the first 126 years of its history.

Prior to 1913, the government operated with revenues raised through tariffs, excise taxes and property taxes, without ever touching a worker's paycheck.

The harmful effects of the income tax are obvious. First and foremost, it has enabled government to expand far beyond its proper constitutional limits, regulating virtually every aspect of our lives. It has given government a claim on our lives and work, destroying our privacy in the process.

It takes billions of dollars out of the legitimate private economy, with most Americans giving more than a third of everything they make to the federal government. This economic drain destroys jobs and penalizes productive behavior.

The ridiculous complexity of the tax laws makes compliance a nightmare for both individuals and businesses.

Is it impossible to end the income tax? I don't believe so. In fact, I believe a serious groundswell movement of disaffected taxpayers is growing in this country. Millions of Americans are fed up with the current tax system, and they will bring pressure on Congress.


-- Andrew Malcolm
No costumes or signs necessary to register here for automatic Twitter alerts on all new Ticket items.
Photo credits: Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times (Anti-spending and anti-tax protestors in Santa Ana, Calif.); Emmanuel Dunand / AFP / Getty Images (Similar protestors in Staten Island, N.Y.); Associated Press (Rep. Ron Paul); Scott Olson / Getty Images - below (Protestors in Chicago).

[wackdeafboy]

[MountyBounty]

Israel stands ready to bomb Iran's nuclear sites

The Israeli military is preparing itself to launch a massive aerial assault on Iran's nuclear facilities within days of being given the go-ahead by its new government.
Among the steps taken to ready Israeli forces for what would be a risky raid requiring pinpoint aerial strikes are the acquisition of three Airborne Warning and Control (AWAC) aircraft and regional missions to simulate the attack.
Two nationwide civil defence drills will help to prepare the public for the retaliation that Israel could face.
“Israel wants to know that if its forces were given the green light they could strike at Iran in a matter of days, even hours. They are making preparations on every level for this eventuality. The message to Iran is that the threat is not just words,” one senior defence official told The Times.

Officials believe that Israel could be required to hit more than a dozen targets, including moving convoys. The sites include Natanz, where thousands of centrifuges produce enriched uranium; Esfahan, where 250 tonnes of gas is stored in tunnels; and Arak, where a heavy water reactor produces plutonium.
The distance from Israel to at least one of the sites is more than 870 miles, a distance that the Israeli force practised covering in a training exercise last year that involved F15 and F16 jets, helicopters and refuelling tankers.
The possible Israeli strike on Iran has drawn comparisons to its attack on the Osirak nuclear facility near Baghdad in 1981. That strike, which destroyed the facility in under 100 seconds, was completed without Israeli losses and checked Iraqi ambitions for a nuclear weapons programme.
“We would not make the threat [against Iran] without the force to back it. There has been a recent move, a number of on-the-ground preparations, that indicate Israel's willingness to act,” said another official from Israel's intelligence community.
He added that it was unlikely that Israel would carry out the attack without receiving at least tacit approval from America, which has struck a more reconciliatory tone in dealing with Iran under its new administration.
An Israeli attack on Iran would entail flying over Jordanian and Iraqi airspace, where US forces have a strong presence.
Ephraim Kam, the deputy director of the Institute for National Security Studies, said it was unlikely that the Americans would approve an attack.
“The American defence establishment is unsure that the operation will be successful. And the results of the operation would only delay Iran's programme by two to four years,” he said.
A visit by President Obama to Israel in June is expected to coincide with the national elections in Iran — timing that would allow the US Administration to re-evaluate diplomatic resolutions with Iran before hearing the Israeli position.
“Many of the leaks or statements made by Israeli leaders and military commanders are meant for deterrence. The message is that if [the international community] is unable to solve the problem they need to take into account that we will solve it our way,” Mr Kam said.
Among recent preparations by the airforce was the Israeli attack of a weapons convoy in Sudan bound for militants in the Gaza Strip.
“Sudan was practice for the Israeli forces on a long-range attack,” Ronen Bergman, the author of The Secret War with Iran, said. “They wanted to see how they handled the transfer of information, hitting a moving target ... In that sense it was a rehearsal.”
Israel has made public its intention to hold the largest-ever nationwide drill next month.
Colonel Hilik Sofer told Haaretz, a daily Israeli newspaper, that the drill would “train for a reality in which during war missiles can fall on any part of the country without warning ... We want the citizens to understand that war can happen tomorrow morning”.
Israel will conduct an exercise with US forces to test the ability of Arrow, its US-funded missile defence system. The exercise would test whether the system could intercept missiles launched at Israel.
“Israel has made it clear that it will not tolerate the threat of a nuclear Iran. According to Israeli Intelligence they will have the bomb within two years ... Once they have a bomb it will be too late, and Israel will have no choice to strike — with or without America,” an official from the Israeli Defence Ministry said.

[Dickie4:20]

Friday, April 17, 2009

May I get paid in Yuans, por favor?


President Obama is trying to apply Band-Aids to the gaping wounds that Bush and his criminal conspiracy inflicted upon our relations with Central and South America. But Obama is being outflanked by China who has been passing out billions in foreign aid to offset the damage the current economic collapse has inflicted on our nearest neighbors.

In a new twist China is giving 10 billion dollars' worth of currency to Argentina. Notice I said "10 billion dollars' worth"; it’s not in dollars; it’s in Chinese currency. This will get Argentina out from under the thumb of US banking interests that have ruined their economy.

In return China is securing access to all manner of raw materials that it needs and it is leaving the US dollar behind. Obama will have an uphill battle explaining to these countries why they should continue to trade with the US. China makes all the manufactured goods we have to trade and will buy everything South America produces. China also offers the added benefit of not trying to overthrow their governments.

Drug lords will probably continue to do business with the US but they will probably start wanting to be paid in Chinese currency. Hell, even economic correspondents want to be paid in Chinese currency.

[MountyBounty]

Guns: A better buy than stocks

Forget stocks and bonds, the real money's in guns.

The Wall Street Journal reports artillery enthusiasts are stocking up on guns and ammo, not necessarily ahead of widespread civil unrest resulting from our ongoing economic swoon, but as an investment. These trigger-happy speculators are betting President Obama will institute a ban on assault rifles, which would crimp supply and send prices, well, shooting up.

For it's part, the Obama administration says it has no plans to enact such legislation and supports the Second Amendment right to bear arms.

During the federal ban on semiautomatic weapons from 1994-2004, prices soared. Recent buying has reached almost a frenzied pitch, creating backlogs for popular models and enabling resellers to list certain guns well above suggested retail prices. AK-47s doubled in price between September 2008 and the end of last year.

Ammo, as well, has become a hot commodity. As one supplier said, "(Ammunition) beats the hell out of money markets and CDs. You can double your investment in ammunition in a year."

Equity investors, too, are betting on Americans arming themselves to the teeth. Smith & Wesson (SWHC), maker of Dirty Harry's weapon of choice -- the .44 Magnum -- has seen its stock jump from around $2 per share to over $6 since Inauguration Day. Still, shares are off around 70% from highs seen as recently as late 2007. Sturm Ruger (RGR), another gun manufacturer, has seen a rise of almost 100% in 2009.