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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (136160)6/25/2012 1:49:59 PM
From: lorne6 Recommendations  Respond to of 224759
 
kenny...Did you know that hussein obama was raised sunni moslum and guess what the moslum brotherhood is also sunni moslum...what a coincidence?



To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (136160)6/25/2012 4:29:33 PM
From: TideGlider1 Recommendation  Respond to of 224759
 
Fed's Lacker: More Stimulus Now Would Just Raise Inflation - Fox Business
Last update: 6/25/2012 12:27:34 PM
      By Kristina Peterson    

WASHINGTON--Further action now by the Federal Reserve to stimulate the U.S. economy would likely just push inflation higher, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond President Jeffrey Lacker told Fox Business Network Monday.
The Richmond Fed chief was the only one of the 12 voting members of the Federal Reserve's policy-making committee to vote against the group's decision last week to extend Operation Twist, a program meant to lower long-term interest rates.
"Further stimulus at this point would most likely just raise inflation," Mr. Lacker said Monday.
While Mr. Lacker said that growth had weakened in the last couple of months, he said it wasn't a "foregone conclusion" that the central bank would decide to start a third round of bond buying at its next policy meeting. "It's going to depend on how the data comes out," he said.
Mr. Lacker has been skeptical of the Fed's ability to boost economic growth by expanding its portfolio of bond holdings.
"The impediments to growth are things that monetary policy is not that capable of offsetting," he said Monday. It can be effective in helping to raise inflation--when that is needed, he said.
"If inflation fell in a sustained way and we needed to boost inflation, I would favor monetary stimulus," Mr. Lacker said.
Though he acknowledged inflation has declined recently due to lower oil and gasoline prices, Mr. Lacker said he thought that the downward drift was only temporary and that inflation would soon settle back around the Fed's target of 2%.
The Richmond Fed chief said he would prefer the central bank to stand pat for now. Mr. Lacker said the right time to start raising short-term interest rates from their current levels near zero would probably be late 2013, depending on the economy's progress.
In January, the Fed's policy-making committee said it expects to leave its easy-money policy in place at least through late 2014.
Mr. Lacker described the economic recovery as one "characterized by swings between stronger growth and much more disappointing levels of growth."
Write to Kristina Peterson at kristina.peterson@dowjones.com.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 25, 2012 12:27 ET (16:27 GMT)



To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (136160)6/26/2012 10:49:37 AM
From: locogringo5 Recommendations  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 224759
 
Unintended consequences?

Mark Levin: SCOTUS immigration decision clears way to sue sanctuary cites, states with in-state tuition.

Levin said, if states can no longer set policies dealing with someone’s immigration status, then sanctuary cities or states may find themselves in hot water. “If this case stands for the point that only the federal government has power in the area of immigration, then let me suggest that sanctuary cities and sanctuary states are unconstitutional because they exist to defy federal immigration law,” Levin said. “That’s number one. So folks out there that have standing, sue your cities, sue your states if they have declared themselves to be sanctuary cities or states because they do not have the constitutional authority to declare butkus. So turn this law against them.”

The same goes for states that offer in-state tuition at colleges for illegal aliens, Levin said.

“In-state tuition clearly is unconstitutional because Congress has not authorized it for illegal aliens,” he said. “Again — if the court’s position is that the federal government has complete preemptive authority over this issue, the federal government has not authorized in-state tuition for illegal aliens of any kind. So sue your state if they’ve instituted in-state tuition for illegals.”

Read more: dailycaller.com




To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (136160)6/26/2012 11:28:27 AM
From: lorne4 Recommendations  Respond to of 224759
 
kenny, Well I'll be darned, It appears even hilary is connected to the sunni moslum brotherhood.

Wow what a lot of coincidences right kenny?

Hillary tied to new Muslim Brotherhood president

Radical links run through secretary of state's chief of staff
by Aaron Klein
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
wnd.com

Saleha Mahmood Abedin, the mother of Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff, reportedly served in the women’s division of the Muslim Brotherhood alongside the wife of Egypt’s new president, the Brotherhood’s Mohammed Mursi.

WND previously exposed Abedin represented a Muslim charity known to have spawned terror groups, including one declared by the U.S. government to be an official al-Qaida front.

WND also reported Clinton spoke at Abedin’s Saudi women’s college, where she was introduced by Abedin alongside the Islamic activist’s daughter, Huma, who serves as Clinton’s chief of staff. At the speech, Clinton praised Saleha’s “pioneering work.”

Saleha Abedin is also the mother-in-law of disgraced former Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y.

Now, author Walid Shoebat is reporting that while she acted as one of 63 leaders of the Muslim Sisterhood, the de facto female version of the Muslim Brotherhood, Saleha Abedin served alongside Najla Ali Mahmoud, the wife of Mursi. Both were members of the Sisterhood’s Guidance Bureau, found Shoebat.

Get a FREE copy of Aaron Klein’s “Manchurian President” with every purchase of “Red Army: The Radical Network That Must Be Defeated to Save America.”

Saleha Mahmood Abedin is an associate professor of sociology at Dar Al-Hekma College in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, which she helped to create. She formerly directed the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs in the U.K. and served as a delegate for the Muslim World League, an Islamic fundamentalist group Osama bin Laden reportedly told an associate was one of his most important charity fronts.

In February 2010, Clinton spoke at Abedin’s college, where she was first introduced by Abedin and then praised the work of the terror-tied professor:

“I have to say a special word about Dr. Saleha Abedin,” Clinton said. “You heard her present the very exciting partnerships that have been pioneered between colleges and universities in the United States and this college. And it is pioneering work to create these kinds of relationships.

“But I have to confess something that Dr. Abedin did not,” Clinton continued, “and that is that I have almost a familial bond with this college. Dr. Abedin’s daughter, one of her three daughters, is my deputy chief of staff, Huma Abedin, who started to work for me when she was a student at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.”

As WND was first to report, Abedin once reportedly represented the Muslim World League, or MWL, a Saudi-financed charity that has spawned Islamic groups accused of terror ties. One of the groups was declared by the U.S. government to be an official al-Qaida front.

Abedin has been quoted in numerous press accounts as both representing the MWL and serving as a delegate for the charity.

In 1995, for example, the Washington Times reported on a United Nations-arranged women’s conference in Beijing that called on governments throughout the world to give women statistical equality with men in the workplace.

The report quoted Abedin, who attended the conference as a delegate, as “also representing the Muslim World League based in Saudi Arabia and the Muslim NGO Caucus.”

The U.N.’s website references a report in the run-up to the Beijing conference also listing Abedin as representing the MWL at the event.

The website posted an article from the now defunct United States Information Agency quoting Abedin and reporting she attended the Beijing conference as “a delegate of the Muslim World League and member of the Muslim Women’s NGO caucus.”

In the article, Abedin was listed under a shorter name, “Dr. Saleha Mahmoud, director of the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs.”

WND has confirmed the individual listed is Huma Abedin’s mother. The reports misspelled part of Abedin’s name. Her full professional name is at times listed as Saleha Mahmood Abedin S.

Al-Qaida links

The MWL, meanwhile, was founded in Mecca in 1962 and bills itself one of the largest Islamic non-governmental organizations.

But according to U.S. government documents and testimony from the charity’s own officials, it is heavily financed by the Saudi government.

The MWL has been accused of terror ties, as have its various offshoots, including the International Islamic Relief Organization, or IIRO, and Al Haramain, which was declared by the U.S. and U.N. a terror financing front.

Indeed, the Treasury Department, in a September 2004 press release, alleged Al Haramain had “direct links” with Osama bin Laden. The group is now banned worldwide by United Nations Security Council Committee 1267.

There long have been reports citing accusations the IIRO and MWL also repeatedly funded al-Qaida.

In 1993, bin Laden reportedly told an associate that the MWL was one of his three most important charity fronts.

An Anti-Defamation League profile of the MWL accuses the group of promulgating a “fundamentalist interpretation of Islam around the world through a large network of charities and affiliated organizations.”

“Its ideological backbone is based on an extremist interpretation of Islam,” the profile states, “and several of its affiliated groups and individuals have been linked to terror-related activity.”

In 2003, U.S. News and World Report documented that accompanying the MWL’s donations, invariably, are “a blizzard of Wahhabist literature.”

“Critics argue that Wahhabism’s more extreme preachings – mistrust of infidels, branding of rival sects as apostates and emphasis on violent jihad –laid the groundwork for terrorist groups around the world,” the report continued.

An Egyptian-American cab driver, Ihab Mohamed Ali Nawawi, was arrested in Florida in 1990 on accusations he was an al-Qaida sleeper agent and a former personal pilot to bin Laden. At the same time he was accused of serving bin Laden, he also reportedly worked for the Pakistani branch of the MWL.

The MWL in 1988 founded the Al Haramain Islamic Foundation, developing chapters in about 50 countries, including for a time in Oregon until it was designated a terror organization.

In the early 1990s, evidence began to grow that the foundation was funding Islamist militants in Somalia and Bosnia, and a 1996 CIA report detailed its Bosnian militant ties.

The U.S. Treasury designated Al Haramain’s offices in Kenya and Tanzania as sponsors of terrorism for their role in planning and funding the 1998 bombings of two American embassies in East Africa. The Comoros Islands office was also designated because it “was used as a staging area and exfiltration route for the perpetrators of the 1998 bombings.”

The New York Times reported in 2003 that Al Haramain had provided funds to the Indonesian terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah, which was responsible for the 2002 Bali bombings that killed 202 people. The Indonesia office was later designated a terrorist entity by the Treasury.

In February 2004, the U.S. Treasury Department froze all Al Haramain’s financial assets pending an investigation, leading the Saudi government to disband the charity and fold it into another group, the Saudi National Commission for Relief and Charity Work Abroad.

In September 2004, the U.S. designated Al-Haramain a terrorist organization.

In June 2008, the Treasury Department applied the terrorist designation to the entire Al-Haramain organization worldwide

Bin Laden’s brother-in-law

In August, 2006, the Treasury Department also designated the Philippine and Indonesian branch offices of the MWL-founded IIRO as terrorist entities “for facilitating fundraising for al-Qaida and affiliated terrorist groups.”

The Treasury Department added: “Abd Al Hamid Sulaiman Al-Mujil, a high-ranking IIRO official [executive director of its Eastern Province Branch] in Saudi Arabia, has used his position to bankroll the al-Qaida network in Southeast Asia. Al-Mujil has a long record of supporting Islamic militant groups, and he has maintained a cell of regular financial donors in the Middle East who support extremist causes.”

In the 1980s, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, Osama bin Laden’s brother-in-law, ran the Philippines offices of the IIRO. Khalifa has been linked to Manila-based plots to target the pope and U.S. airlines.

The IIRO has also been accused of funding Hamas, Algerian radicals, Afghanistan militant bases and the Egyptian terror group Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya.

The New York Post reported the families of the 9/11 victims filed a lawsuit against IIRO and other Muslim organizations for having “played key roles in laundering of funds to the terrorists in the 1998 African embassy bombings,” and for having been involved in the “financing and ‘aiding and abetting’ of terrorists in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.”

‘Saudi government front’

In a court case in Canada, Arafat El-Asahi, the Canadian director of both the IIRO and the MWL, admitted the charities are near entities of the Saudi government.

Stated El-Asahi: “The Muslim World League, which is the mother of IIRO, is a fully government-funded organization. In other words, I work for the Government of Saudi Arabia. I am an employee of that government.

“Second, the IIRO is the relief branch of that organization, which means that we are controlled in all our activities and plans by the Government of Saudi Arabia. Keep that in mind, please,” he said.

Despite its offshoots being implicated in terror financing, the U.S. government never designated the MWL itself as a terror-financing charity. Many have speculated the U.S. has been trying to not embarrass the Saudi government.

With research by Brenda J. Elliott



To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (136160)6/26/2012 11:30:27 AM
From: lorne2 Recommendations  Respond to of 224759
 
Top secret: $80B a year for food stamps, but feds won’t reveal what’s purchased
By Luke Rosiak
The Washington Times
Sunday, June 24, 2012
washingtontimes.com

Americans spend $80 billion each year financing food stamps for the poor, but the country has no idea where or how the money is spent.

Food stamps can be spent on goods ranging from candy to steak and are accepted at retailers from gas stations that primarily sell potato chips to fried-chicken restaurants. And as the amount spent on food stamps has more than doubled in recent years, the amount of food stamps laundered into cash has increased dramatically, government statistics show.

But the government won’t say which stores are doing the most business in food stamps, and even it doesn’t know what kinds of food those taxpayer dollars buy.

Coinciding with lobbying by convenience stores, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the program in conjunction with states, contends that disclosing how much each store authorized to accept benefits, known as the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), receives in taxpayer funds would amount to revealing trade secrets.

As a result, fraud is hard to track and the efficacy of the massive program is impossible to evaluate.

As the House debates the once-every-five-years farm bill, the majority of which goes to food stamps, there is a renewed and fervent call from a broad spectrum of camps that the information — some of the most high-dollar, frequently requested and closely held secrets of the government — be set free.

“We can’t release it based on federal rules. If it were up to us, I wouldn’t have a problem releasing the information. It’s taxpayer money,” said Tom Steinhauser with the division of benefit programs for the Virginia Department of Social Services.

The District said it would be illegal to tell the newspaper how many food stamp dollars were flowing to each local vendor, but first offered to sell The Washington Times the information for $125,000.

“Why don’t you just pay the charges? Your paper has a lot of money,” said David Umansky, spokesman for the District’s chief financial officer.

Told that the newspaper would not pay, the CFO’s office then said that only JP Morgan, to which it contracted out operations, had access to the store totals and that the office had never looked at them. After six months of the local government attempting to extract the information from JP Morgan, the District finally said that releasing the information would be illegal.

States instructed not to tell

Maryland denied The Times’ request for data under the Freedom of Information Act, saying the information belonged to the federal government, which instructed states not to release it.

Legislation seemingly designed to protect the industry goes so far as to say that anyone who releases the amount of food stamp dollars paid to a store can be jailed.

Profiting from the poor’s taxpayer-funded purchases has become big business for a mix of major companies and corner bodegas, which have spent millions of dollars lobbying Congress and the USDA to keep the money flowing freely.

The National Association of Convenience Store Operators alone spends millions of dollars on lobbying yearly, including $1 million in the first quarter of this year.
In February, 7-Eleven hired a former aide to House Speaker John A. Boehner, Ohio Republican, to lobby on “issues related to the general application and approval process for qualified establishments serving SNAP-eligible recipients.”

The USDA is notoriously secretive about who receives its money, relying on weak legal reasoning, said Steve Ellis of the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense.

“USDA hides behind a specious proprietary data argument: The public doesn’t want to know internal business decisions or information about specific individuals’ finances,” he said. “The USDA sees retailers, junk food manufacturers and the big ag lobby as their customers, rather than the taxpayer.”

The agency also has no idea what type of food the benefits are buying, even though the combination of universal bar codes and benefit cards makes that entirely feasible.

“It’s one of those questions that frankly those of us who have been working on this issue have been struggling with a long time because we need to see the data. The industry looks at it as proprietary. The USDA doesn’t track where that money goes,” said Beth Johnson, a former Senate Agriculture Committee and USDA staffer who now consults for the Snack Food Association.

She noted that stores have breakdowns of products bought with food stamps but declined to share them with the USDA.

The junk food lobby appreciates the informational void.

‘Anecdotal info’

Susan Smith of the National Confectioners Association, a candy trade group, dismissed assertions that food stamp recipients commonly buy candy and soda as “anecdotal info,” while declining to call for the collection of statistics.

The government is “keenly interested” in what types of food the $80 billion purchases, but has not made an effort to track it.

“USDA is preparing to update a study of the feasibility of capturing detailed purchase data from over 200,000 retailers that redeem SNAP benefits, and continue to explore other options to gather information on SNAP participants’ diet quality,” Jimmie Turner, a spokesman for the USDA, said by email.

The demand for the information has been festering for years.

Last year, the Argus Leader, a South Dakota newspaper, sued the USDA for the information, and the USDA has fought fiercely in court filings that have stretched through this month to prevent disclosure.

This month, the public-interest group Eat Drink Politics called on the USDA to release the totals by retailer and for Congress to require the USDA to determine what types of food are purchased.

In a few cases, states have released subsets of the information, triggering the anger of the USDA.
In two years, Wal-Mart received about half of the $1 billion in SNAP expenditures in Oklahoma, the state revealed to the Tulsa World, as Eat Drink Politics noted.

In the District and other urban areas, much more is likely spent at corner stores where junk food is more abundant and fraud is more common. If a small corner store reported high levels of food stamp sales, that could be an obvious indicator that it was accepting customers’ food stamps and giving back cash, a common scheme.

Eat Drink Politics called on the House to mandate that the USDA begin tracking food types and release store totals, calling them “critical to effective evaluation.”

The Senate passed a version of the farm bill Thursday that lowers food stamp spending by $4.5 billion. But no one in either chamber has proposed an amendment to require the USDA to reveal where the remaining money is going.