Paris – French central banking authorities joined a continental trend of taking peoples' retirement funds for the purpose of buying treasury bonds.
Widespread rioting in major cities such as Paris and Lyons has followed.
Asset managers will have a chance to get billions of Euros in mandates in the next few months for the FRR, or French reserve pension fund following a parliamentary action to use the fund's assets to pay off the national debt accrued by the welfare system.
Hungary and Ireland have made similar moves. Irish workers have to endure a reduction in the minimum wage in support of the rememedy approved by that nation's parliament.
Fine Gael Labour and Sinn Fein attacked the stated intentions to use the National Pension Reserve Fund to help provide a further 10 billion Euros in further capital for the banks, which could expand to 35 billion if their losses are biggger than expected.
U.S. Congressional committees have studied similar remedies in connection with seizing Private IRA/Pension and 401K's. Many money managers are counseling their clients to pay the early withdrawal penalties, take their retirement funds out of the programs and buy precious metals while they still are able to make the move.
Analysts are predicting a turbulent time in the coming months due to swiftly rising food prices brought on by unseasonable drought throughout the temperate world. Light harvests of wheat has led to hundreds of percent increases in the prices of staple supplies.
One cannot help but notice that, like their sisters who participated in the bread riots of the French Revolution ("Let them eat cake." - Marie Antoinette), the women take to the forefront of the barricade lines while the men use them as a shield from behind which they are free to take careful aim and throw cobblestones and other debris at the gendarmes.
The "strophe, antistrophe and epode were a kind of stanza framed only for the music." - John Milton, "Samson Agonistes." The strophe was chanted by a Greek chorus as it moved from right to left across the skênê.
McAllen - Heavy fighting broke out last week – again, as a matter or routine – between rebel drug cartel gunmen trained by U.S. Special Forces, and the Mexican military.
They have been fighting now for the past 4 years over extremely lucrative smuggling routes for high-priced illegal drugs, illegal aliens and freshly laundered cash.
Since nothing happens in a vacuum, certainly local and state officials have taken notice.
It's kind of hard to ignore 12,000 pounds of marijuana seized at the Falfurrias Border Patrol checkpoint – part of a record seizure level for one week of more than 20 tons of the stuff, tens of thousands of deaths on the Mexican side of the border, the cold-blooded murder by drug cartel pirates of a man who was out riding around on Falcon Lake sight-seeing on jet skis with his wife, and the abandonment of the entire bullet-pocked Mexican town of Ciudad Mier in Tamaulipas, all of which has forced multiple shutdowns of two international bridges that lead from McAllen and Starr County to the Valley towns rich in agriculture and population.
In response to multiple threats that come from anonymous sources south of the border – people who say “Back off or you'll be sorry” – Zapata County Sheriff “Sigi” Gonzales says his department will continue to do their job - that is, protecting the citizens of Zapata County.
Whose job is that?
The Constitution of the United States declares it's one of the enumerated powers of the federal government, to defend the borders and repel invasions.
Article 1, Section 8, Clause 15 declares and enumerates that “Congress shall have power...To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute The Laws Of The Union, suppress insurrections and repel invasion.”
How?
By declaring war in cases where the U.S. has been attacked or invaded. If so, then merry hell ensues, as we all know. If not, then the attendant drama is something to behold.
Political scientists, social psychologists and other social scientists of all designations have described the well-known stages of a nation girding itself for war, chief among them the “war dance.”
In preparations for the Civil War, or The War Of Northern Aggression, as described by adherents to the Confederate cause, the conflict shaped up over states' rights as described in the 10th Amendment:
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
The question was simple enough. Would southern states be allowed to continue to count slaves as non-voting members of the population – chattel property with no civil or human rights whatsover - for purposes of Congressional and legislative apportionment and redistricting? At the same time, would the establishment continue to tolerate a system of tobacco, rice, and cotton plantations staffed by completely unenfranchised persons, people subject to property laws pertaining to their owners' inventory of chattel, yet who were counted as citizens, constituents who were to be represented in Congress?
It cost the lives of an estimated 650 to 700,000 men to settle that question, about 200,000 of whom were killed outright in battle, and another 400,000 who died from complications of disease.
There are no figures available for how many wandered the streets and roads of America like stray dogs until they finally couldn't stand it any more and died from what was then called “nostalgia,” later called shell shock, combat psychosis, and is now referred to euphemistically as “post traumatic stress disorder.”
When the shakeout came, it was only on the terms dictated by a business power elite centered in northern industrial urban areas. More than an additional 100 years were required to effect the full emancipation of black slaves and a bestowal of a full array of civil rights upon their heirs, something which the new Republican Party's Presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln, avoided like a plague that would surely cost him his life, which it did.
Mr. Lincoln was the last soldier to die because of a battle wound in that tremendous conflict. He was shot in the back of the head by a man who shouted “Sic semper tyrannis!” or, “Thus always to tyrants,” the state motto of the Commonwealth of Virginia, as he leaped to the stage of Ford's Theater and made his escape after fracturing a bone in his leg.
In that hassle, states' rights figured in this way.
Seven states found they could not tolerate the election of President Lincoln and seceded immediately. The President was on record as a strict constructionist of the 10th Amendment. He had long held that, while he argued with the moral rationale and peculiarly twisted mental adjustments necessary to justify it, “the institution of slavery is founded on injustice and bad policy, but...the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends to increase rather than abate its evils.”
His opinion was that because of the 10th Amendment, there was no constitutional way to declare slavery illegal in the states.
When it came to the abolition of slavery in the 10-mile square “seat of government,” the District of Columbia at Washington, he held that though such a measure would be constitutional, it should not be done without the consent of the people who lived there. In that instance, his take on the anti-slavery litmus test closely resembled the holdings of the courts on the abolition of firearm ownership in the District, recently overturned in the Heller decision. Ordinary citizens do have the right to keep and bear arms, regardless of city or state proscriptions of that right, the Court has held in subsequent decisions, but city and state authorities have the right to make rules regarding their ownership, storage, transportation, registration and licensure for concealed carry.
He furthermore refused to denounce the Fugitive Slave Law in public or to cease making equivocal statements about racial equality during his Senatorial campaign against Stephen Douglas, where he flip flopped between the two opposing views in appearances in Chicago, where he advocated abolition, and in Charleston, the “Little Egypt” town in southern Illinois, where he maintained that “there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”
Seeking to preserve the border security at Charleston, South Carolina, Mr. Lincoln had federal troops and Navy ships attempt to take over and resupply Ft. Sumter, which is situated on an island in the middle of the bay, commanding the entrance to the harbor.
Confederate forces seized upon the issue as a casus belli and declared war upon the United States for its invasion of the Confederate States of America.
At this point, an additional 4 states seceded and joined the Confederacy. President Lincoln had federal troops cross the Potomac into northern Virginia, and the war was on.
Seceding from the United States of America is not a casual idea, one to be tossed around idly, in jest, or in anything other than utmost sincerity.
It's the real deal, as Mr. Dan Rather of Wharton, Texas, by way of The Heights of Houston's First Ward, would say.
Washington - Now that the Thanksgiving holidays are over, it's time to get back to work, according the the President.
Saying if there was one message received loud and clear this month from voters, it was “one single focus – making sure their work is rewarded,” President Barack Obama laid out a largely symbolic cost reduction program in his budget proposals.
The new austerity measure is considered symbolic because it is aimed at a $1.4 trillion deficit.
To start with, all federal workers' salaries will be frozen at present levels for the next two years.
The salary freeze will not affect members of the Armed Forces, but will apply to civilian Department of Defense workers and all other federal employees.
The President explained that he froze political the salaries of political appointees the day he took office. The President's annual salary of $400,000 has been fixed since January, 2001.
The cost-cutting measure will save taxpayers an estimated $20 billion over the coming budget period, $28 billion over the next 5 years and $60 billion over the next 10 years, according to the President.
The bi-partisan debt commission will release its report later this week. According to a co-chairman, the proposals will include cuts to Social Security benefits, higher taxes for millions of Americans and an end to the mortgage interest and child tax credit deductions presently allowed on income tax returns.
In all, 120 programs will come under the knife, including $50 billion in improper payments, the sale of non-essential lands owned by the federal government and a continuation of the freeze on Congressmen and Senators' $170,000 per year salaries. Lawmakers have eschewed an automatic $1,600 a year increase to their salaries on their own behalf.
These are part of the “tough decisions that this town has put off for a long time,” the President said.
At the end of his announcement, the President took no questions from media representatives.
New York - Work continues apace on the United Nations Small Arms Agreement, an instrument that would add the U.S. to a growing list of nations that don't allow their citizens gun ownership.
Word is that the loose-knit coalition of more than 500 non-governmental organizations known as the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA) has raised millions in donations to propagate the notion that guns spell disaster for peoples' freedoms. Both Japan and the UK have contributed heavily.
Asked one commonwealth country's representative, "How the hell do you get rid of a UN bureaucrat?"
They are still with us the old Europeans with their symphonic whiskers and laughing operas and gloomy forests and wall-eyed madonnas and strange memories of bones and battles fought over and over and flaming speeches and whirling waltzes and storms of philosophy and tides of religion
they are still with us the old Asians with their tinkling songs and their bearded operas and bamboo memories and Buddhas of mercy and back-to-front alphabets tasting of raw fish and bitter tea and thin-sliced dreams and cold clear spring water pin-prick tortures and the peace of a blue blue sky
they are still with us the old Africans with their dancing legends and slapping stories and painted songs and carved rhinosceros dreams shaped by hands and fires stone kings with horse-faces slaves of ivory the flapping of trade-flags and countless flying spears and the zebra sunlight of wars and drumming jungle heartbeats
they are still with us the old Americans with their Clovis points and their Tea Parties and Trails of Tears and their lost jungle kingdoms those totem-pole economies gambling on the next harvest and wheeling buffalo-hunters and dealing in corn and beads and scalped Creole singalongs and ragging blues beat-box jazz
ah, and ah, they are still with us the old Australians with their roarimg fires and wailing songlines and giants and dwarves and soaring eagle stories oldest strangest fossils heaving round boulders and peeling opal trees and endless roads of deepest secrets of children stolen adults not returned and Flying Doctor highways and slouch-hat bridges...
and the world afternoon wears on it's a cape it's a top-hat it's a smiling vagabond - all the riches and all the songs are just layers and layers of skin that sleep as the tide goes out so very gently and is greeted by the normal moon and stars rise stars fall, little sisters : we are natives on this whirligig Earth !
"The Legendary" (April 20, 2010. Issue 16.)
I.G. Rehorek lives in South Australia, married 2 kids 1 wife 1 tenor sax 1 alto 2sopranos 1 trumpet lots of recorders 1 small dog teaches printmaking/art history/mural painting at Aboriginal college performance poet stage name avalanche shoe size 8 planet of origin Earth, apparently, specifically the Northern Hemisphere, Central Europe, City of Prague.
Wikileaks.org has started leaking sensitive information about U.S. foreign relations overseas in advance of a Monday morning release time, as announced earlier.
Wikileaks to release sensitive information; U.S. is briefing allies pronto and preemptively
London - A projected release of back channel diplomatic cables by Wikileaks has sent U.S. government types into high power damage control mode.
Since the government does not know precisely what will be leaked, or when, the United States is in the embarrassing position of not knowing exactly what to tell its allies to prepare for the onslaught of negative opinion that will surely follow.
Private assessments of personalities, motives and prospects for future cooperation are among information it is rumored will be placed at public disposal on the organization's website, according to published reports.
The diplomatic cables are said to be seven times the volume of nearly 400,000 documents concerning the war in Iraq and Afghanistan that were leaked in October and include assessments of political movements inside allied countries during recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
According to the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, James F. Jeffrey, the information presents a serious barrier to further diplomatic normalcy. The Obama Administration warned that lives are in danger as a result.
Suspicion focuses on U.S. Army PFC Bradley Manning as the alleged leaker of the information.
Foreign diplomats have told newsmen that it is their understanding the person who betrayed the secrecy of the communications has been arrested.
The Wikileaks organization is headed by Julian Assange, a former computer hacker from Australia who is on the run in Scandinavia and England at present.
Mr. Assange has told interviewers that the documents leaked so far contain information which "intersects" with the classified and secret intelligence operations of such government agencies as the CIA. For a quick and dirty digest of what has been released so far, go to:
They found 6 ounces of marijuana on the bus after someone smelled them burning one while they rolled through the check point
Sierra Blanca - Sometimes it takes a legend to really wring out all the blood and sweat and tears there are to be found in the blues - the white boy blues that come out of the cotton patches and factories, the truck stops and the back alley crap games in the dusty nights hot as hell and black as ink.
There are few beer joint characters up and down the interstates who don't have a Willie Nelson story, how the old boy came in the place, got to talking to people, real friendly, then went out to the car and got his old guitar and played them a couple of his tunes.
It's true. He really is that kind of a man. I've seen him in action.
He's an entertainer and a poet, an interpreter of the tones and times who sings just a split second behind the beat and picks like wild fire.
Up here on this hell hole of a ridge top where the highway winds around a mountain range and plunges off into another long, drawn-out grade headed for El Paso del Norte. You can see for many miles and there is a border checkpoint where they keep a dog on a leash on the other side of the grade, headed east, just to see if he will alert at the smell of any reefer madness.
Somebody opened the door of Honeysuckle Rose and the odor of a burning green, leafy, herbaceous substance came drifting out where a federal officer of the law, a Border Patrolman, smelled it.
Mr. Willie Nelson, described in the encyclopedia as a native son of Abbott, Texas, born in 1933, a country singer and song writer of international fame, told the gendarmes the 6 ounces of weed belonged to him and the deputies of the Hudspeth County Sheriff hauled he and two others in on the charges where they set his bond at $2,500 and let him go on his way - on the road again.
God speed, Mr. Nelson. We need you out here with the rest of us. You be careful, hoss. Real careful. Times are hard enough like it is, you hear?
It's a big, round world, a world that some days seems to be spinning around madly, out of control. Yeah.
Some of the oldies really get down to the root of the thing of the thing of the thing. Make you want to dance; make you want to holler, clap your hands. Yeah.
Refinance packagers bracing for title insurance cyberspace infowars
Edinburgh - Government types, mortgage lenders, bankers - all are aware that with 90,000 homes foreclosed last month, a $6 trillion housing bubble loss to financial institutions overall, and 3-4 million homes on the line over the next 3 to 4 years, he who knows who owes is in the cat bird seat.
The cost of doing business is the key slot, a factor of which futurists everywhere are angling to get an accurate picture.
Enter the solid state technology of chip-driven USB thumb flash drives. With a capacity for information anywhere from 4, 6, 8 or 16 gigabytes, these puppies retail at prices from $10 to $40 the copy, depending on where you shop. Units with a much higher capacity are available – wholesale, of course.
It's a cybernetic innovation which, by comparison, has rendered the CD labor-intensive, slow and expensive.
One of the nation's largest home lenders, Bank Of America, declared a moratorium on home foreclosures in all 50 states until the institution can determine if information it receives from title search companies is really and truly accurate.
In fact, attorneys general in more than one state – Connecticut and Ohio are on record – consider the fact that employees of title insurance companies have supplied incomplete or inaccurate information to expedite the process of foreclosure and resales a severe form of fraud. After all, the home is the basis of personal wealth for all persons, rich and poor.
With such a burning need for the rapid acquisition of accurate information, it's no surprise that a Houston-based company complained to the Open Records Division of the Texas Attorney General's Office and obtained a favorable opinion ordering the Hidalgo County Clerk to allow information on ownership, plat and financial records including divorce settlements to be transferred to their offices on thumb drive rather than on CD's.
The cost differential to Integrity Title Records, Ltd. LLP, a division of a multiple services company that provides title insurance, information on current title plants from as early as the 1800's and off-line research and retrieval, is huge, to say the least.
Marian Cones, vice president of the organization, received a quote of “cost recovery” of $79.70 per CD, for a total of $87,430.90 for 750 GB of data, including a copy of the grantor/grantee index in electronic format from the earliest date to the current; a copy of all document images in electronic format from ealiest date to current; and a copy of all plats in electronic format from the earliest date they have been recorded.
After a thorough review of the situation, Assistant Attorney General Christoper D. Sterner of the Education and Enforcement Section of the Open Records Division of the AG's office ordered the Hidalgo County Clerk's Office Manager Noe Lopez, Jr., to purchase the thumb drives necessary and charge accordingly.
The reasoning is simple enough. When any citizen asks for information in electronic format, it doesn't matter what that format may be. The fact that a governmental entity has rendered its USB outlets inoperative for security purposes is no excuse.
It's up to what format is chosen by the requester, according to the ruling.
The clerk's office was not allowed to charge as a cost $1,200 for a new computer system, but only for the cost of thumb drives needed to get the job done.
Mr. Sterner wrote in the opinion ordering the compliance with the Open Records Act request, “We not a governmental body that fails to provide the required statement pursuant to Section 552.2615 (of the Open Records Act, Tex. Govt. Code) may not collect more than $40 in total charges, regardless of the governmental body's actual costs to provide the copies...”
New Black Panther Party for Self Defense toted the stick, wore berets at Philly polls
In a 2009 National Geographic television broadcast, New Black Panther Party members are shown marching on, and burning an American flag while others are shown posing with weapons.
King Samir Shabazz, a member of the Philadelphia chapter, is filmed bluntly denouncing and advocating direct violence against whites.
“I hate white people. All of them. Every last iota of a cracker, I hate him...There’s too much serious business going on in the black community to be out here sliding through South Street with white, dirty, cracker, whores [bleep] on our arm. And we call ourself black men with African garb on. What the hell is wrong with you, black man? . . . We keep beggin’ white people for freedom. No wonder we not free. Your enemy cannot make you free, fool. You want freedom, you going to have to kill some crackers. You’re going to have to kill some of their babies.”
Mr. Shabazz and Jerry Jackson, whom federal authorities describe as a subordinate to him in the Philadelphia chapter, are depicted in a video outside a Philadelphia polling place on Fairmount Ave. on election day, 2008.
They are dressed in paramilitary garb, wearing the Panthers' signature black berets. Mr. Jackson is sporting a night stick. They were reportedly shouting racial epithets at white people, harrassing poll workers and poll watchers.
All this has become the subject of a federal lawsuit prosecuted by the Voting Rights Division of the Department of Justice, an action critics say has not been very vigorously pursued by government attorneys due to political pressure applied by the Attorney General and White House staff.
The critics?
Let's try the oversight agency appointed to ride herd on questions of this type, the Federal Civil Rights Commission.
It's all covered by a 144-page report recently released by the Commission that is highly critical of the Department of Justice. The main thrust is that certain supervisors inside the department are reluctant to pursue cases alleging complaints of reverse racism against such minority defendants as the New Black Panther Party For Self Defense.
Staff attorneys who work on such cases are marginalized and isolated, according to the report. Two who worked on the New Black Panther Party case were ordered to ignore subpoenas and told not to testify. neither of them work for the department.
Naturally, Mr. Shabazz, Mr. Jackson and others have refused to be deposed, citing their Fifth Amendment right to be safe from self incrimination.
Other allegations leveled by the commission include:
1. witholding documents under unspecified executive privileges; 2. refusal to provide witness statements from poll watchers; 3. a heavy redaction of FBI incident reports; 4. a refusal to provide copies of pleadings prepared for managers; 5. provide copies of memos between trial attorneys and managers; 6. a refusal to provide e-mails between divisions and staff 7. the outright refusal to provide a copy of an order default judgment.
After many years of investigations both state and federal, he could face life in prison
Austin - It took 11 years of constant criminal inquiries to do it, but a jury in Texas finally convicted former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay on charges he illegally transferred corporate contributions to legislative candidates in 2002.
Formerly the most powerful Republican in Congress, Mr. DeLay now faces up to life in prison.
After 19 hours of deliberation, jurors returned guilty verdicts today on charges of money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
The charges stem from a complicated series of transactions between Mr. DeLay's political action committee, corporate donors, and Republican candidates for legislative offices during the election year of 2002.
Prosecutors charged the former congressman from Sugarland with using his political action committee to illegally channel $190,000 in corporate donations into Texas legislative races through a “money swap.”
The defense was unable to create a reasonable doubt in the mind of even one juror that the transactions were illegal.
Mr. DeLay and his attorneys maintained no corporate funds went to Texas candidates and the money swap was legal.
Though famed Houston criminal defense attorney presented much evidence to the contrary, a district judge ruled there would be no need for a change of venue from the liberal jurisdiction of Travis County due to massive and prolonged pre-trial publicity during federal investigations of Mr. DeLay's alleged ties to lobbyist Jack Abramoff and illegal dealings with Indian tribes seeking federal influence in casino gambling complaints on reservations.
Mr. DeGuerin introduced a poll that showed that in the Austin area, Mr. DeLay had name recognition on a par with former President George W. Bush and a negative approval rating of 44%.
Asked what it proved, Mr. DeLay joked after the Court's unfavorable pre-trial ruling to leave the prosecution in Austin, “It proves I can't run for public office.”
Mr. DeLay also faced numerous civil suits filed by Democratic Congressional Committee executive Patrick Kennedy alleging various improprieties, all of which were dismissed along with federal criminal investigations earlier this year. Federal prosecutors and Justice Department attorneys, counsel for the House Ethics Committee and Congressional leadership had asserted that they could find no case for his conviction on criminal charges.
He told interviewers before the Austin trial began that the political landscape has changed, that in today's atmosphere, “They want to vilify you, put you in prison, bury you and dance on your grave.”
Mr. DeGuerin's pleas to jurors echoed that sentiment. He said more than once that if it hadn't been for former Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle, the case against Mr. DeLay case would have been forgotten long ago.
In comparison with the case of U.S. Representative Charles Rangel, Mr. DeLay said his case was “completely different” because, “I was never guilty.” Mr. Rangel, in comparison, he said, had admitted that much of what he had done was wrong in not filing his tax returns and reporting his income on a timely basis.
The Legendary is going to hit the road for a couple of days, but I'm not taking a plane. I think I'll take a train - a freight.
This way, I won't have to worry about anyone touching my junk.
Flight personnel won't have to worry about that, either. They were suspended from full body "back scatter" and pat-down examinations late last week after the chief of the 11,000-member Pilots' Association raised much hell in public, made "The Atlantic" Magazine, and stimulated some action.
Harvest feast, here I come.
I want to play this one for all those folks at the Tenth Amendment Center who are involved in the nullification movement, pulling for the nullification of government-controlled health care and the nullification of the federal criminal marijuana laws in a challenge to the liberal interpretation of the "commerce clause" of Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution.
I only wish it was going out over Radio KOME at Meridian, Texas, but you know how the corporation games go. Someone is always playing them. In this case, the outfit that controls the station has its transmitter attached to the Bosque County government's tower. The county needs a commercial radio outlet to justify certain federal emergency services grants.
No one wants to pay for the cost of transmitting, so you can't hear the station's broadcasts. The net net: no rock-ola from the Ayatollah. Ho Ho.
Pish, posh and fiddle faddle. Who cares? They're always playing corporation games.
Austin - A GOP State Representative from Tyler has introduced a bill that would require a Presidential candidate to file a copy of a birth certificate with the Secretary of State in order to be placed on the ballot in Texas.
The proposed bill, HB 295, which was pre-filed by Representative Leo Berman, is one of four similar measures reported pending in state houses in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Texas and Arizona.
“Birthers,” who insist that President Barack Hussein Obama is not a natural-born citizen of the U.S. as required by the Constitution, hope the law will make an end run around numerous attempts to disqualify him from serving in the Oval Office through litigation in the the federal courts.
So far, none of the lawsuits filed have been granted discovery status in the courts, so the President has not been required to furnish any further documentation of the whereabouts and circumstances of his birth.
Mr. Obama has furnished a “certification of live birth” document printed on acid-free paper that is printed with 3-D designs considered impossible to forge or alter through xerography. It is a certified record of the information that was recorded on his birth date by the Registrar of Live Birth at Honolulu.
It plainly states he was born in 1961 to his parents of record at Honolulu, Hawaii, the 50th state of the union, at a certain time of the day.
This form of birth certificate is the only one accepted by state driver's license bureaus, the Department of Defense, the U.S. Department of State Passport Office, and many other bureaucracies which require proof of citizenship status for various legal reasons.
Previous forms are easy to forge or alter and over a period of time, the State Departments of Health were required to centralize, computerize and standardize birth records on forms of this type. The birth records are stored on computer databases in vaults fire-protected by Halon extinguisher systems, an ionic process that attacks fire at an atomic level and prevents further ignition without mutilating or destroying computer files or papers.
Similar systems are used in food preparation areas and in vaults where valuable furs or works of art are stored.
Most bureaucracies no longer accept certified copies of birth certificates issued by city or county bureaus of vital statistics or from hospitals or clinics as other than adjunctive or secondary proof of birth certification.
Several self-proclaimed experts have declared Mr. Obama's certification of live birth a forgery, but their declarations were later disproven. In one case, a person who produced what he purported to be a Kenyan birth certificate was discredited when experts determined the document was a forgery.
Mr. Berman's proposed legislation would require that “The secretary of state may not certify the name of a candidate for president or vice president unless the candidate has presented the candidate's original birth certificate indicating that the person is a natural born United States citizen.”
Tens of thousands of concerned citizens have signed a petition circulated by World Net Daily CEO and founder Joseph Farah questioning the adequacy of the documentation provided by Mr. Obama's staff in regards to his nativity.
Mr. Farah has published numerous books and pamphlets, as well as many articles on the subject, including speculation that Mr. Obama attended many schools, colleges and universities on scholarships reserved for foreign students and disallowed to native Americans.
He has arranged many billboards to be printed and displayed nationwide that read “Where's the birth certificate?”
President Obama has so far refused to produce any further documentation. He insists that he has complied with the requirements outlined in Article 2, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution.
“No person except a natural-born citizen or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of the President; neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States...the same shall devolve on the Vice President...”
This document surfaced in late July and was filed with a U.S. District Court by attorney Orly Taitz, who demanded it be authenticated. The judge held that the plaintiff had no standing to bring suit.
All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent. - Thomas Jefferson
There really is such a thing as evil, and when it comes to call, though it leaves its card of false fear, it's as real as the snow and as vital as the winds of March, or the lightning and thunder of summer.
I know it for what it is and for the feeling it always arouses in me, that of wanting to run, run, run – to run for home, for safety, for those who love me - and the sudden coating of tears it brings to my eyes, that brassy, dull taste in my mouth, and the panicked butterflies that suddenly want to fly out of my stomach and be free.
A month ago, on the morning of October 18 between 8:30 a.m. and 9, evil stalked the town of Henning, Tennessee, a place near the big river, the father of waters, named the Mississippi, and broadcast its stink on the early autumn winds, left its calling cards of random and unnameable fear strewn all though the bottoms of that great river.
It took the lives of two women who worked at the post office, selling stamps and collecting postage for packages, then fled in a car either maroon or burgundy in color – witnesses aren't really sure. No one seems to be certain.
Authorities won't say exactly what they found, other than that a cowardly attacker or perhaps two attackers, left two decent and fairly young women dead, shot down and left dead like a pair of worthless playthings cast aside in the playground of an insane child.
They do know that two entered the post office and two left, got into the car and blithely drove away without attracting much attention.
Authorities are so sure that someone knows more – in fact, knows exactly what happened – that they have doubled a federal reward for information leading to an arrest from $25,000 to $50,000.
The authorities are postal inspectors - the post office cops - the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and, of course, the Kingfish of all the suits, the FBI, as well as the detectives of the Tennessee state cops, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, county sheriff's officers and city police who keep law and order in this small community located about 45 miles northeast of Memphis on Highway 51.
Today, local news media reports, people are locking their doors, carefully studying the features of any stranger who comes through town, laying away from their traditional gathering spots in front of the coin laundry or at the local convenience store across the street from the post office, which stands closed, its perimeter beribboned by yellow tape and its postal boxes taped shut. A temporary post office on wheels stands next door, doing business with a customer base so small that the local office does not provide home delivery for clients who live in town. They have to pick up their mail in person.
Less than 1,000 people live in Henning.
The only really notable thing in town is a museum devoted to the accomplishments and fame of its most famous citizen, Alex Haley, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning non-fiction fiction novel, Roots, which tells the story of his family's immigration from Africa as slaves – of Kunta Kinte and Chicken George, and dozens of unforgettable characters as real as the Reverend Malcolm X, Mr. Malcolm Little, whose autobiography he penned, the victim of a shotgun blast in a Harlem ballroom after a bitter dispute with officials of his church, the Black Muslim Church.
Mr. Haley died in 1992.
What is known is that the perpetrators might happen to be among the local population, or they may have hit the highway, the Great River Road, or any of dozens of routes that criss-cross the continent, and simply drove away to greener pastures, new territory to exploit at will.
And, yes, authorities are positive that someone saw exactly what happened and is keeping silent for any of an infinite number of perfectly good reasons.
Fear, the calling card of truly fundamental evil, is as real as fire and ice and concrete and steel, warm baby puppies and the mighty oaks and cypresses that line the water courses of the heartland, the creeks and bayous and rivers and sloughs.
It is a force with which one must reckon. Fail to come to grips with its consuming powers, and it is for sure you will perish, dying the thousand deaths of the coward, the one who is afraid to live for fear of dying.
And then there are the rumors.
The killings were part of a gang initiation.
There was a certain package at that post office at that time, and its very presence and the need to retrieve it was potent enough to cause the violent demise of two innocent postal workers.
A surveillance camera that hangs on the wall is not real; it's a dummy that has no inner working parts, records no pictures.
The man who installed it came across the street for a cup of coffee and told all the idlers standing around on one foot, then the other, that is true on the day he hung it on the wall.
It's true. It's all true. A friend of a friend said so.
More than 60 federal investigators are sifting the evidence, bagging and tagging and numbering the clues, snapping the photos, logging the calls, cataloging the statements, working the case. They want these evil doers and they want them bad, lock, stock and barrel, buttoned down and indicted, convicted by unassailable evidence.
People are looking at each other sideways, watching from the corners of their eyes.
Police followed a man and his wife all the way to Jackson where they visited a sick relative and did some Christmas shopping at Wal-Mart.
They subjected the man to a polygraph examination, but still they were not satisfied. They kept he and his wife under surveillance.
The couple finally had their attorney send a certified letter to the authorities, requesting that they stop their surveillance. He called it a form of harrassment.
A woman who works across the street visited the post office about 15 minutes before she had returned to her job and heard sirens and saw police swarming the building.
She said the scene was eerily silent, uncharacteristically silent, that something was wrong, though she did not know exactly what. It was just too quiet in there. She left - and didn't look back. Now, she's very grateful she followed her inclination and got out of there quickly.
She now tells her friends, and has given a statement to police, saying that she believes that at that time, death was waiting for her, silently waiting for her to do anything or make any move that would make her a witness and would cause a need for her to be eliminated violently then, there, at the point of a gun – for no other reason.
That is what terror looks like; that's the way it sounds. Those are the basic elements of its ugly face, its stinking breath, its fundamentally evil ways.
The truth is this, and nothing much else is known for sure. Two women with kids are dead, buried, but not forgotten. Their names are Paula Robinson, a 33-year-old retail clerk, and Jucy Spray, a rural letter carrier aged 59 years.
Their relatives beg for someone to come forward and speak for them, to tell their story, to help see to it that the persons who stole their lives so violently are apprehended and punished to the full extent of the law.
It is a reasonable request. One can only hope, for their sake, against hope, and wish for the best outcome.
Listen to this sick fool rant and rave about the basic nature of what has happened. Listen to his twisted words and ridiculous logic and know that you are in the presence of evil – fundamental evil, and run for home and safety and never lose sight of it, for it is your life and it's nothing to play around with.
I'm reading Lefty's papers, although I don't know why.
Assassins, cons and rapers might as well die - Steely Dan, 1970-something or the other
Inchon, Korea – South Korean military officials report at least 10 casualties and damage to buildings following an artillery barrage on an island in the Yellow Sea that began about 2:30 p.m. local time today.
F-16 fighter jets scrambled and retaliated in air strikes on North Korea after 200 rounds fell on Yeonpyeong Island, located about 80 kilometers west of Seoul, just south of the North Korean coast. South Korean artillerymen responded with 80 rounds fired at the enemy.
The attack came during a service-wide alert and military exercise simulating an attack by North Korean forces.
In May, the North Koreans sank a 1,200-ton displacement South Korean corvette in a class equivalent to the Destroyer Escort type of the U.S. Navy with a torpedo.
Over the weekend, the revelation that North Korea has perfected and brought on-line a uranium-enrichment plant came amid rumors of war and widespread talk of another nuclear test in the planning stages.
Cross border artillery and mortar attacks on troops patrolling the Demilitarized Zone are routine in this divided nation. So far, knowledgeable military experts say, the South Korean response to what is considered a definite escalation of hostilities is nothing other than standard operating procedure.
Shelling continued throughout the day, according to updated reports.
Austin - Some like it hot and Texas House Speaker Joe Straus (R-Dist.121 – San Antonio) seems to be able to take the temperature - and the humidity – even on his worst days.
After charging the House Ethics panel with finding out if blogging or making entries on Facebook and Tweet is a form of political advertising, he's liable to discover new dimensions to the age-old question, “Hot, ain't it?”
Going into the upcoming legislative season, it's the Speaker's job to charge the solons with making findings.
If the ethics panel, which is meeting behind closed doors today at the Capitol, finds that writing about politics on a blog, in Facebook or Tweeter entries, is a form of political advertising and lawmakers act, potentially a writer would face having to attach a value to his words and make a formal report to the Texas Ethics Commission.
In the perpetual conflict over free speech issues, it's nothing new to see a lawmaker trying to find a way to attach new licensing requirements to what the Courts have long held a form of privileged expression.
Here is what the dump Straus movement is lit up red hot and squawking about this morning.
House Committee on General Investigating and Ethics 1. Review state law in light of the effects of Texas Ethics Commission Advisory Opinion No. 484 relating to acceptance of benefits provided to officeholders. Recommend any necessary legislative changes.
2. Review the definition of "political advertising" and determine whether the definition should be expanded to include content contained in blogs and other types of Internet communications.
3. Monitor the agencies and programs under the committee's jurisdiction.
Don't hold your breath, but if any such measure should pass, it would face a long and chilly reception in the federal courts before you can add one more place politics as a conversational subject is verboten – right behind churches, ice cream socials and Texas beer joints.
The resulting intervener and amicus curiae briefs would make colorful reading, to say the least.
Many flags would unfurl, no doubt.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. - The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America
If you don't read Russian or understand the spoken language, don't fret it. Just watch the pictures.
The Russian skipper took back the tanker from the Somali pirates. He confiscated their weapons, wired the "fishing boat" for scuttling, then left them handcuffed to stationary objects and got back underway.
The results were spectacular, to say the least.
It's all perfectly legal when the master of a war ship is dealing with pirates. He can do whatever he wants with them once he's through with his operation. The old man of the guided missile destroyer decided to slot these boys to Davy Jones' locker. May they rest in peace full five fathoms deep.
The truth is, the conflict remains, no matter what you call it, and it has far reaching implications for working men and women.
In an appearance before a panel discussion led by Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the French National Bank, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said last week, “Emerging countries,” places such as Brazil, Turkey or South Africa, “are carrying a double burden” in a “two-speed” global recovery that has left the most advanced countries lagging far behind China and India.
It's the same point President Obama tried and failed to make at the G-20 Summit meeting in Seoul.
The pair call it “persistent imbalances” in the trade that “represent a growing financial and economic risk.”
The source of conflict, the flexible currency exchange rates realized by emerging industrial economies, seems not to be up for negotiation.
The U.S. has run into a stone wall and it's both the collision and the sudden stop that hurts.
Here's how it works out.
To paper over the huge gaps caused by deficit spending, the central banks of certain economies such as the U.S. have for many years engaged in the intentional devaluation of its currency – competitive devaluation, or, as China calls it, “currency war.”
Xinhua (sheen-wah), the official government news agency of the People's Republic of China, defines the dynamic thusly, as a “situation where one nation, relying on its strong economic power, buffets its competitors and seizes other nations' wealth through monetary and foreign exchange policies. It is a form of economic warfare with cold premeditation, specific purpose and considerable destructive power.”
Though currency devaluation has adverse consequences on a state – leading to a reduction in citizens' material standard of living as purchasing power is reduced in buying imports and traveling abroad - it does have a silver lining in times of high unemployment, or when a nation wishes to go after a policy of export-led growth such as China and Korea have pursued vigorously over the past three decades. Any knowledgeable observer who purchased a computer, a set of tires or a flat screen television in the past few years knows all about that.
The blowback is expensive.
International debt servicing becomes more costly, especially when denominated in a foreign currency; foreign investors are discouraged by the poor posture exhibited by a weakened currency.
Consumers and working people are coming to experience new ways of coping that are dictated by a devalued dollar, and it chafes, to say the least.
A lower value for the home team currency leads to increased production in terms of gross domestic product, which should raise employment. It works when other options such as public spending are closed off due to huge debt, or when an imbalance of payments exists.
But a cheaper dollar will not be enough, Mr. Bernanke conceded at the Frankfurt conference.
“Deficit countries have to do their part,” he told central bank executives from around the globe.
When Bank of Mexico Governor Agustin Carstens asked what the United States will do to reduce its trade deficit, he replied that a cheaper dollar will not be enough.
“It would be difficult for exchange rates by themselves to restore balance,” he said.
The remark really didn't clear the air.
The riff came after repeated attacks by member nations over the predicted Nov. 3 post-election announcement that the Fed will begin to inject $600 billion into the system buying up Treasury bonds. The program will last until June in hopes of reducing long-term interest rates.
Critics pounced immediately, warning that the Fed's monetary policy could lead to price bubbles such as the housing boom that crashed in 2007, leaving the world's financial markets in an economic tailspin and resulting in widespread unemployment – a 10% factor that has hovered there for the past 18 months.
Though the nation's economic policy makers have succeeded in halving the targeted 2% inflation rate and kept that factor at about 1%, the critics are not satisfied.
Speakers at a libertarian Cato Institute conference held in Washington the same day denounced the Fed's new policy, as have many others over the past two weeks.
Congressional Republicans are expected to follow suit, labeling the Fed's new policies as yet another element of the “Obama agenda.”
No mention of an extension of the Bush tax cuts made it to the floor of discussion.
Austin - He's ready to call out the militia, send in the crack troops and get proactive with the Mexican drug cartels.
Governor Rick Perry is sounding more like a presidential candidate every time he gets in sight of a television camera.
“I think we have to use every aspect of law enforcement that we have, including the military,” he told an interviewer late last week. “Any means that we can to run these people off our border and to save Americans' lives, we need to be engaged in.”
Sounding very unequivocal, it's the kind of sound byte that is designed to thrust any face in the center of the national spotlight.
Though the feds have stationed several hundred National Guardsmen on the border and he called on President Obama so send more in August, the governor told a convention of guardsmen gathered here that “They need some lessons in remedial math in Washington.”
Texas has about 64% of the lineal breadth of the U.S.-Mexican border, he pointed out. The ratio of troops sent so far just doesn't jibe with the area to be placed under military protection.
All this is taking place in the face of a brutal internecine political dust-up across the border between conservatives and the old one-party political structure of Mexico's PRI, the Institutional Revolutionary Party recently overthrown by the PAN, the National Action Party that put President Felipe Calderon in power four years ago.
In the resulting power vacuum, the organized crime world has made bold moves for dominance and is winning by keeping border towns under the thumb of terror, a situation where journalists are afraid to publish facts, police are known to look the other way when murder, rape, extortion and robbery takes place in broad daylight, and the nation's elite special operations troops have defected and taken their U.S.-supplied fully automatic weapons with them to settle down in more lucrative pastures selling drugs and smuggling people and cash across the Rio Grande. Muders, beheadings, mass kidnapping, car bombs – it's all a matter of routine in a war-torn region.
President Calderon is jockeying for a unified police command, a more streamlined model in which the local gendarmes would be brought under the control of the 32 state governments.
It's a no go, according to knowledgeable observers. The PRI Party members of the Mexican congress have no intentions of allow PAN any kind of victory going into the elections they hope to upset in favor of a return to normalcy.
“There is no consensus among lawmakers, not even within the PAN. There is a lot of opposition to the proposal for a unified police command, PAN Senator Alejandro Gonzalez said. He heads the Senate's justice committee.
“The Mexican Congress has used its newly acquired power not to push through modernizing reforms but rather to control and thwart the executive at every turn,” said political analyst Denise Dresser.
“The goal is to hit the criminal where it hurts most, on the economic front, Calderon said the same day Governor Perry hurled his invective about sending American troops into harm's way to stabilize the situation.
It's a mark the Mexican government is failing to hit by wide margins. Most analysts hold that sales of illicit narcotics tops $40 billion yearly, most of it in sales of marijuana to Americans who are silly enough to pay the inflated prices demanded for the stuff.
“I think you have the same situation as you had in Colombia. Obviously, Mexico has to approve any type of assistance that we can give them. But the fact of the matter is, these are people who are highly motivated with money. They are vicious. They are armed to the teeth. I want to see them defeated,” said Governor Perry.
The Department of Homeland Security said the governor has it within his authority to deploy the guard as he sees fit, so long as Texas pays for it.
Trained cadres are already in place. The governor sent specially trained units of Texas Rangers to penetrate the maze and get a grip on the problem from both sides of the border.
Starting this year, the national debt, fueled by entitlements such as Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and the like, has started its inexorable climb to unsustainable levels.
Like a credit card debt that grows out of sight, leaving the obligated consumer in the dust, unable to pay even the minimum payments, this conundrum is here - now - in your face.
There is no bankruptcy court, no discharge of unsecured debt available, and certainly no protection from creditors through the intervention of a bankruptcy trustee. This is hardball, major league jazz, the kind that leads to war, famine and aggression.
Your nation owes its economic soul to some people who live in very rough neighborhoods and they are not noted for their enlightened attitudes or kind and gentle ways when it comes to profligate American big spenders.
Economists predict that by the year 2030, the debt will be a little more than 180% of the Gross Domestic Product and fully unsustainable, meaning the economy will not be able to outpace even the debt service, or interest carry, on what the Treasury owes its creditors.
This is no joke; the time is now; either U.S. Citizens revolt against the bondage of unsustainable debt, or they will succumb to the certain slavery that is bound to follow.
Who benefits?
The bond departments of certain huge Wall Street law firms, international bankers and bond traders in markets throughout the world's financial capitals where anyone has the cash to buy into the pot and take their chances.
We are definitely expecting rain; we just don't know who's going to get wet - at least not yet.
This was the year of decision, a knife fight between alley cats and you know who won.
Dig the blood-stained sidewalks, the stink coming out of the alleys.
Next stop, the full-dress bayonet charge that will surely follow in 2012.
The Fed – that venerable private banking institution that regulates the money supply, the worth of the dollar and sets the prime interest rate to heat up and cool the cash flow – has always been ignored by Capitol Hill and the President.
But now it's become impossible for the Board of Governors to quietly paper over the nation's budget deficits and escape the oversight and accountability of a desperate population struggling to break free of a credit crunch and economic crisis of epic proportions while waiting to wake up from a nightmare that keeps getting worse and worse - in Technicolor and Cinemascope.
It was embarrassingly difficult to ignore the chilly reception President Barack Hussein Obama received from Asian chiefs of state at Seoul last week during the G-20 summit conference.
The nation's chief creditors were decidedly uptight about the Federal Reserve's announcement that it will soon begin buying up the national debt to the tune of $600 billion.
In fact, the situation is considered so alarming that no less than World Bank President Robert Zoellick suggested gold could play a helpful role in the global monetary system. Serving as a reference against more volatile “fiat” currencies, the precious metal could be viewed as money.
Say again?
Money.
Who needs it?
The finance ministers from the Group of 20 who are hanging out there over the chasm with noting in their bulging saddlebags but American paper, that's who.
Suddenly, the Fed is receiving political and media scrutiny galore, something strange and very unusual in a nation of go-go cowboy capitalists and coupon clippers now forced to tiptoe through the t-bonds and t-bills barefoot and bereft of a strong form of legal tender, looking for something to smile about while stomaching the stimulus.
Listen to the platitudes as they float by like trial balloons at the obligatory press appearance and “news opportunity” last week in Seoul between President Obama and the Chinese chief of state, President Hu.
The simple truth is this and nothing less. The debt stands at $1.4 trillion with no clear cut plan to address the problem.
I said I have no clear cut perception of the problem with which to address the problem. No plan. No approach with which to assess, examine or attempt to even describe the magnitude of the mess they done got us in now. I think I heard a pretty dame on the television say it would take as long as 425,000 years to pay it off if thus, so, such and such and blah blah blah, etc., etc.
Faced with something of that magnitude, all a little old pot-bellied man knows to say is to shrug, shake his gray old head and recite that wondrous word, "Whatever."
Austin - Following a stint as a Captain of Texas Rangers, Samuel H. Walker found himself wanting a more powerful handgun for his dragoons who were fighting the Mexican War at Veracruz in 1846.
He traveled north and east to see Samuel Colt at Hartford, Connecticut, and the two designed the ultimate revolver for cavalrymen, the Walker Colt.
It was a cap and ball pistol so large and heavy at 4.5 pounds unloaded that it was carried in holsters mounted on the saddle horns of troopers' mounts. Nevertheless, it was considered as accurate as a rifle at 100 yards and at 50 yards it was formidable, with an ability to bring down a man, his mount, or anything else living and breathing that got in the way.
Only 1,100 of the fearsome weapons were made originally. They bring about $150,000 as antiques, one carried by a trooper in the Mexican War having sold at auction for nearly $1 million.
The main consumer was the Republic of Texas, a mythic political anachronism from the dim recesses of constitutional lore all but forgotten anywhere but in this Lone Star State of Texas.
And then there is the all but forgotten and vilified myth of the gun, that totem, tool and piece of business equipment carried in the open on every hip during the settlement of the new frontier with Mexico once President Andrew Jackson and his trusty brethren who signed, revolutionized and held out for a constitutional republic to replace the border at the Sabine River and push it back hundreds upon hundreds of miles inside Mexican territory.
Now a 4-term State Representative from Rockwall and Collin Counties has joined the fray. She is looking to make some changes as hefty as the Walker was in its day in a challenge to the “commerce clause” of the U.S. Constitution, that pesky jumble of words found in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3 that gives to Congress as an enumerated power the right to “regulate commerce...among the several states...”
Rep. Jodie Laubenberg, a free market conservative from Parker, has pre-filed House Bill 145, a Firearms Freedom Act similar to one passed in Montana from model Tenth Amendment Center legislation that would exempt firearms and ammunition manufactured, marketed and retained in Texas from all federal regulation of any type, including 18 USC 922, the federal statute that makes it illegal for anyone to manufacture or deal in firearms without a federal firearms license (FFL).
How did the federal government get involved in so many businesses and manfacturing concerns?
Legal experts say it was all part of the New Deal, a key piece of legislation of which was inspired by the legal arguments of a University of Chicago law professor who persuaded Congressmen and judges that “commerce” included all gainful economic activities, not just interstate trade defined as sales of goods and and the performance of services carried out across borders of U.S. political subdivisions, the states.
The issue was growing wheat in one's own back 40 for in-house consumption – and not for sale - something disallowed under the price support program of the first of the New Deal farm bills. The Courts held with the government and the rest is history in areas as diverse as civil rights and manufacturing, mining and marijuana, Obamacare and Cap & Trade.
It is now “necessary and proper for Congress to regulate everything that substantially affects commerce,” according to Rob Natelson, free market activist and constitutional scholar, author of numerous books on the subject while a professor at the University of Montana and now employed by the Independence Institute in Colorado.
It's all part of a nationwide attack on the influence of the commerce clause and Virginia is leading the charge with HB1438, the work of Delegate Mark Cole, which would make all such activities exempt from federal regulation if they are carried out on an intrastate basis with no interstate involvement whatsover.
This law is also pre-filed and ready to go as soon as the Virginia legislature comes into session in January. Similar intrastate commerce bills were filed in 2010 sessions of the legislatures of Wyoming, Oklahoma and Georgia. Firearms Freedom Acts are now law in Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, South Dakota, Utah, Tennessee and Arizona.
Watch these columns for news on the subject. We await further developments with alacrity.
Lisa Murkowski first Senator to win off-ballot re-election in 50 years
She eschews earmark ban, dumps Sarah Palin as Presidential candidate
Juneau – When the write-in ballots for Senator Lisa Murkowski reached an edge of more than 10,000 with only 700 votes left to count over Tea Party-endorsed challenger and nominee Joe Miller, the Secretary of State called the Senator in Washington, D.C. with the good news.
That figure included more than 8,000 ballots challenged by Joe Miller on grounds of illegibility or misspellings. Mr. Miller's organization has not yet made a decision on whether to demand a recount.
She is the first Senator to win re-election as a write-in candidate in more than 50 years and Lisa Murkowski did so after refudiating former Governor Sarah Palin as a potential Presidential condidate.
She told CBS anchor Katie Couric that Mrs. Palin lacks the “intellectual curiosity” is takes to make a good president.
What's more, her office issued a statement today opposing a Republican-inspired resolution calling for a ban on Congressional earmark spending.
Becuause her re-election has not yet been certified, she was unable to vote in the resolution, but had she been able, she said, she would have voted against it.
“The notion that Congress would abdicate its constitutional duty and turn federal spending over to government bureaucrats is wrong and goes against the Constitution's mandate that says the power of the purse lies with the legislative branch of government,” she said.
She said that “Furthermore, an earmark moratorium will not reduce the level of spending by one cent or decrease the deficit...”
The entire Alaska Congressional delegation “is united on this issue,” she said.
Ms. Murkowski said she intends to continue to caucus with the Republican delegation to the U.S. Senate, but will go her own way in many matters requiring her vote.
