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| | Nouvelles en Langue Anglaise |  |
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+10Shansaa jam Ungern Laogorus EddieCochran OmbreBlanche Le chanoine quantat Zed Biloulou 14 participants | |
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| | Sujet: Nouvelles en Langue Anglaise 8/11/2008, 13:47 | |
| Rappel du premier message :Browse Newspapers by country
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| | Sujet: 2561 - 12/7/2010, 08:53 | |
| Ombre se refusait a croire les resultats de sondage qui montraient une forte chance de degringolade pour le parti du POTUS en novembre prochain, et sans vouloir jouer a Perette... 'No Doubt' Republicans Can Retake House in Fall, Gibbs Says AP
In remarks that could be intended to light a fire under dispirited Democrats, the White House press secretary warns the party could lose its majority in the House in November elections where Republicans need to gain about 40 seats to take control. |
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| | Sujet: 2562 - Roman Polanski's Freedom -- And Unmitigated Gall 13/7/2010, 13:22 | |
| Roman Polanski's Freedom -- And Unmitigated Gall By Eugene RobinsonWASHINGTON -- For Roman Polanski, the long, unspeakable nightmare of being confined to his three-story chalet in Gstaad, the luxury resort in the Swiss Alps, is finally over. The fugitive director is free once again to stroll into town, have a nice meal, maybe do a little shopping at the local Cartier, Hermes or Louis Vuitton boutiques.- Spoiler:
Or he could just scurry like a rat into France or Poland, the two countries where he has citizenship -- and where authorities have a long history of acting as if Polanski's celebrity and talent somehow negate his sexual brutalization of a 13-year-old girl.
I'm betting on the rodent option, even though Swiss authorities are doing their best to convince Polanski that he can relax and enjoy the fondue without ever having to answer for his crimes. After all, they did force him to wear an electronic ankle bracelet for several whole months. (BEG ITAL)The horror. The horror.(END ITAL) After authorities announced Monday that they were denying the U.S. request to have Polanski extradited, one of the famed auteur's lawyers called the decision "an enormous satisfaction and a great relief after the pain suffered by Roman Polanski and his family." That statement should stand as the definitive textbook example of unmitigated gall.
Anyone tempted to feel Polanski's pain should take a closer look at the case. In 1977, when he was 43, Polanski lured a 13-year-old girl to a house in the Hollywood hills owned by Jack Nicholson -- the actor was not home at the time -- and plied her with drugs and champagne before having sex with her.
Polanski and his lawyers claimed that the sex was consensual. That's absurd as a legal argument, since the girl was too young to give her consent. But the girl's grand jury testimony makes clear that this was anything but a no-fault romp. She testified that Polanski, on the ruse of photographing her and wanting to make her a star, convinced her to pose nude and then assaulted her.
She testified that Polanski raped and sodomized her, against her will, and that she was distraught before, during and after the act. The director was indicted on six felony charges, including rape by use of drugs and child molestation, but was allowed to plead guilty to one count of unlawful sexual intercourse. Polanski, who spent about a month and a half in jail, thought he had a deal that would get him off with nothing worse than 90 days in confinement under psychiatric observation. But when the judge had second thoughts about going through with such a lenient deal, Polanski fled. He has been on the lam ever since.
Polanski is a great filmmaker, and his Hollywood friends and supporters have blithely taken the position that his genius outweighs his crimes. Whoopi Goldberg opined last year that what happened between Polanski and the child "wasn't rape-rape." More than 100 movie-business luminaries -- including Martin Scorsese, Mike Nichols, Harvey Weinstein and, yes, the inappropriately libidinous Woody Allen -- signed a petition asking Swiss authorities to set Polanski free. I hope they're satisfied now that their prayers have been answered.
The decision by Switzerland to release the artist from his gilded cage was based on a technicality. The issue was "not about deciding whether he is guilty or not guilty," Justice Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf said. She's right; Polanski is guilty by his own admission. What the Swiss have decided is that despite admitting his crimes and fleeing from U.S. justice, Polanski will never have to be punished.
It's relevant that Polanski has never shown remorse. He claimed in a 1979 interview that he was being hounded because "everyone wants to (have sex with) young girls." It's irrelevant that the victim, now a middle-aged woman, has no interest in pursuing the case and reliving a traumatic episode. What matters is what Polanski admitted doing to her 33 years ago -- and the fact that Polanski decided to run away rather than face the music.
Swiss officials noted the obvious: that Polanski never would have visited Switzerland if he had thought he was putting himself in legal jeopardy. Since he's not a legitimate candidate for kidnapping and rendition by the CIA, he's now home free -- unless he somehow makes another mistake. He'll always have to look over his shoulder.
That's punishment of a sort, but not nearly enough. How about this: As long as he steers clear of U.S. justice, why don't we steer clear of his movies?
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| | Sujet: 2563 - 13/7/2010, 13:39 | |
| Felons Voting Illegally May Have Put Franken Over the Top in Minnesota, Study FindsBy Ed BarnesPublished July 12, 2010| FoxNews.comThe six-month election recount that turned former "Saturday Night Live" comedian Al Franken into a U.S. senator may have been decided by convicted felons who voted illegally in Minnesota's Twin Cities.- Spoiler:
 APA study finds that at least 341 convicted felons voted illegally in the election that made former "Saturday Night Live" comedian Al Franken a U.S. senator in 2008.
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| | Sujet: 2564 - The Big Green Lie Exposed 13/7/2010, 13:53 | |
| Voila qui est encourageant. The Big Green Lie Exposed As the reports from Dutch and British watchdog panels came in last week, greens hailed what they see as a vindication of the East Anglia Climate Research Unit and the partial rehabilitation of the IPCC, but they are wrong. As usual, the greens (and many of their critics) are missing the point.- Spoiler:
The Big Green Lie is falling apart. And it’s not about Climategate and Glaciergate. It’s not about the science. It’s not even about public confidence in the integrity of the green movement — although this confidence is unlikely to regain the levels of 2009. Humpty Dumpty has fallen from the walls, and all the establishment commissions and investigations in Europe cannot glue him together again.The core green problem is about the credibility of its policy proposals and the viability of the political strategy the big green groups pushed to enact them. Climategate and Glaciergate did not cause the collapse of the green agenda in Copenhagen and they are not responsible for the global decline in green political fortunes since then. Both the greens and their opponents need to understand that the reason that the Great Global Green Dream is melting lies in the sad truth that whatever the scientific facts of the matter, the global green movement is so blind and inept when it comes to policy and process that it has deeply damaged the causes it cares most about. (Credit: UN Climate Talks)Not since the incident at Chappaquiddick derailed the Ted Kennedy for President boomlet of 1969 has a political movement imploded so fast and so messily as the green crusade to stop global warming. Just last November, the world’s leaders were elbowing each other aside to get in front of the cameras at what was billed as the Copenhagen Summit to Save the Planet. These days, nothing in the world is deader than the drive for a UN climate treaty — and polls around the world show voters less worried about climate change than about a host of other issues.Here in the US, Al Gore has unaccountably disappeared from the leadership of the climate change movement; John Kerry has taken over the leadership of America’s greens. Kerry is fighting to get some kind of energy bill through the Senate despite fierce political headwinds, but it is already clear that the only way to get a bill through the Senate is to bait it with so many favors for so many special interests that its environmental impact will be, at best, small while its pork factor will be huge. Even that may not suffice; the last time I checked the smart money, Intrade thought there was a one in four chance that a cap and trade bill will get through Congress by December of this year. With Congress expected to be significantly more conservative after the midterm election, chances of significant climate legislation during President Obama’s first term range from slim to none.The global process is in an even deeper hole. The greens, it is increasingly clear, bet the ranch on the Copenhagen process. That horrible meltdown, perhaps the biggest and most chaotic public embarrassment in the history of multilateral summits, turned climate change from global poster boy to global pariah. The green activists who advised their bosses to go to that summit and make large public commitments about global warming are in the doghouse now. Success is sometimes the most cruel and definitive form of failure: the Copenhagen Summit was exactly that kind of success for the climate change movement. They got all the world leaders together, got every television camera on the planet to focus in — and let everybody see just how confused and utopian their plans really were.As the greens struggle to figure out how a cause so righteous, so necessary has gone so far off course, the Kool-Aide drinkers among them have frenetically concocted and endlessly repeated a narrative that casts all blame on the vileness and the stupidity of their opponents. Those awful climate deniers and their nefarious Big Oil paymasters are the vicious super villains who stopped this glorious social movement dead in its tracks. Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and other evil quacks manufactured the appearance of scandal — the East Anglia emails, the ‘glaciergate’ charge and so forth. Aided by a clueless media, and pushed by evil carbon emitters, these non-stories took on a macabre life of their own.But now, natter the cluelessly chirpy greens, all that is over. Limbaugh’s Big Lie has been conclusively disproved! The independent panels have reviewed the evidence in a dispassionate and thorough way, and both climate science and climate scientists have been cleared.So presumably we will all be going back to Copenhagen soon, this time ready to sign up for that treaty?Well, no. For one thing, the ‘vindication’ is less sweeping and thorough than the green cheerleaders acknowledge. As climate skeptic Pat Michaels argues in the Wall Street Journal, some of the investigators had significant links to the targets of the investigation and many of the most important questions were not addressed. A suspicious and skeptical public will not be convinced without a significantly more transparent process; the story isn’t over yet. Not until commissions that include prominent climate skeptics and genuinely independent figures ask all the relevant questions will this story die down.Worse, even the very partial and incomplete results now emerging are in some ways a damaging indictment of the impartiality and trustworthiness of some climate scientists and environmental leaders. The greens were found innocent of inventing the science, but guilty of systematically hyping their case. The serious media are distancing themselves from the green leadership at this point more than nuzzling back into their arms. The New York Times report on the Dutch and British reports investigating the East Anglia CRU and the IPCC was widely hailed by infatuated green outlets as evidence that the whole scandal was a fraud; the actual Times story is considerably more cautious (and the text is more cautious than the headline). Andrew Revkin, whose coverage on his Times Dot Earth blog has often been considerably sharper and more far-sighted than what appears in the Grey Lady’s printed pages and has made him no friends among the environmentalist hard core, is making some very solid points.The influential Economist, which has long been one of the most respected establishment voices urging fast action on climate change, is now voicing important qualifications and doubts about the green case. Perhaps even more than the Times, the Economist takes a sober view of recent events, noting that there is a pattern of exaggeration and hype in the IPCC documents reflecting some serious management and culture problems — and suggesting that Rajendra Pachauri is not the man to set things right. More, the Economist is putting out some extraordinary journalism on the complexity of the climate change problem and the difficulties that result when one tries to leap from science to policy. What the Economist is reporting is that excitable greens have oversold a wide variety of worst case scenarios — and underestimated the complex nature of the relationship between climate change and world politics.In sum, the mainstream press seems to be swinging around toward the views expressed on this blog: that the scandals may not discredit or even really affect the underlying scientific arguments about climate change but they do cast doubt on the perspicacity of the movement’s leadership — and that a fundamental rethink is called for.Greens who feared and climate skeptics who hoped that the rash of investigations following Climategate and Glaciergate and all the other problems would reveal some gaping obvious flaws in the science of climate change were watching the wrong thing. The Big Green Lie (or Delusion, to be charitable) isn’t so much that climate change is happening and that it is very likely caused or at least exacerbated by human activity. The Big Lie is that the green movement is a source of coherent or responsible counsel about what to do.The greens claim to be diagnosticians and therapists: that they can both name the disease and heal it. They are wrong. The attitudes and political vision of a group of NGO pressure groups may work when it comes to harassing Japanese whale ships in the Antarctic; this vision and these people come up short when set against the challenge of moderating the impact of human industrial activity on the earth’s climate system. Many leaders of today’s environmental movement are like the anti-alcohol activists before Prohibition who convinced Americans that the problem of alcohol abuse was real, destructive, and likely to get worse unless addressed. These farsighted activists were absolutely correct: with the introduction of the motorcar alcohol was more destructive than ever; with more than 500,000 alcohol related highway deaths between 1982 and 2008, more Americans have been killed on our roads as a result of drunk driving since 1915 than have died in our wars.The problem is that the remedy proposed, Prohibition, not only failed to solve the problem — it made the problem of alcohol abuse worse, and it also reduced respect for the law and led to the rise of organized crime in the United States on an unprecedented scale.The Prohibitionists were brilliantly, scientifically correct about the problem: they were foolishly and destructively blind about how to deal with it.The green movement’s strategic failure is also reminiscent of the Peace Movement of the 1920s. Chuckleheaded do-gooders correctly recognized the problem of war. In the conditions of the twentieth century, great power wars like World War One were radically unacceptable. Unless war could be stopped, scores of millions might brutally die. Whole nations would be devastated; millions of children would starve. Given the rise of aircraft, great cultural monuments would be destroyed as the world’s greatest cities were razed to the ground. New and more terrible weapons would be developed under wartime conditions, weapons that potentially could lead to the destruction of all human civilization or even of life on earth.Again, the Peace Movement of the 1920s was completely right about this — we know to our sorrow today just how right they were. Yet the strategies they proposed — a treaty to ‘outlaw war’ in the 1920s, and appeasement of dictators and revisionist powers in the 193os — were utter disasters and made World War Two inevitable. The Nuclear Freeze movement in the 1980s repeated the mistake: confusing the identification of a problem (nuclear weapons) with a workable policy solution (a unilateral western freeze on nuclear weapons deployment that would have given the Soviets superiority in Europe). There are fewer nuclear weapons today than would have existed had the Nuclear Freeze people had their way; there almost certainly would have been fewer wars and fewer war deaths if the policy recommendations of the pre-World War Two peace movements had been greeted with the obloquy and contempt they deserved.You can diagnose a disease but have no clue how to treat it. You can be an excellent climate scientist and a wretched social engineer. You can want to do good and end up furthering exactly the evils you most deplore.That is where most of the organized green groups stand today.The real and lasting damage that the green movement sustained in the last eight months has been the revelation that it is strategically and politically incompetent. It adopted a foolish grand strategy (a global treaty by unanimous consent) and attempted to stampede the world to agreement by hyping the science and whooping the treaty through. That was never going to work; the green movement today is living with the bitter consequences of its strategic blindness.The problem is real; therefore my solution is right: that is the faulty logic behind the Green Lie, and it is exactly the tired old lie of the Prohibitionists and the peace quacks. Alcohol abuse, war, nuclear weapons and excessive emission of greenhouse gasses are all bad. Those facts, however, do not make Prohibition, the Kellog-Briand Pact, the nuclear freeze or the Big Green treaty movement smart, effective or good.History is brutal and unforgiving; good intentions are no excuse. The nobler the cause, the worse the betrayal. Precisely because a growing body of science points to the existence of some serious concerns about climate, we must think carefully and clearly. Malthusian panic attacks alternating with utopian dreams of universal accords, anti-growth politics and anti-capitalist resentments dressed up as environmentalism aren’t going to help us.“Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” Sir Toby Belch asked the Puritanical steward Malvolio in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Human nature is not going to change because hair-shirted environmentalists think we should become more ascetic. The world economy must and will grow; world living standards can and must continue to rise. Grandiose global treaties to regulate economic activity and limit growth will never work any more than airy global treaties will get rid of war. Complex cap and trade systems are going to be distorted by lobbyists and gamed by lawyers — just as the biofuels program turned into just another special interest farm subsidy. Americans didn’t stop drinking because the bluenosed progressive reformers of the day thought it would help. They, and other people as well, aren’t going to give up their lifestyles just because there is a climate problem.This doesn’t mean that nothing can or should be done. Nudging the US economy toward less energy intensive activity while cutting the costs of hiring people is a sensible way to promote the kind of high tech, complex service economy that will serve us best down the road with or without global warming; I personally think the substitution of a carbon tax for payroll taxes would be sound public policy even if global warming turned out to be a total fraud.I note that the Indian government, as allergic as ever to the Copenhagen approach, is attempting to end that country’s wasteful and destructive policy of subsidizing energy use by keeping fuel costs artificially low. This is happening for economic, not environmental reasons: the Indian government simply cannot afford the cost of these subsidies, and it is prepared to face strikes and protests to see the reforms through. This single reform if carried through and sustained, is likely to do more for the environment than the complex, expensive, time consuming and largely ineffectualKyoto Protocol. Ending fuel subsidies was not a green idea; it was a growth idea. It was not a global policy; it was an Indian policy. The ideas that get us out of this mess will be ideas that work for specific countries and that make the economy work better, produce more wealth and use energy and raw materials more efficiently.Alcohol abuse was a real problem in 1918, but the Prohibitionist belief that there was One Big Legislative Answer only made things worse. Over the years, we’ve made progress on reducing the effect of alcohol abuse on our society in various ways. Organizations like AA have helped millions stop drinking while leaving those who can drink responsibly to do so in peace. Strict enforcement of drunk driving laws has dramatically reduced highway deaths due to drink. Many of the most important advances had nothing to do with direct assaults on the alcohol problem. Increased economic competition ended the days of the three martini lunch. Attacks on discrimination against women have given women and children more economic choices when Daddy spends all his money at the corner saloon; enforcement of laws against domestic violence has helped curb the vicious spouse and child abuse that was once part of John Barleycorn’s toll on our society. We are not all the way there yet, and as long as human nature is what it is we may never get there, but once we had the good sense to ignore Carry Nation and the crazy Prohibitionist cranks, we were able to make significant and sustained progress dealing with the problem. Carry Nation, hatchet in hand.Something like this is going to have to happen on the climate front. Relatively small steps, or larger steps often undertaken for reasons that have little directly to do with climate, will have to see us through. Until more greens understand that, and until the green movement as a whole disabuses itself of the dangerous fantasy that the way to solve our environmental problems is to embrace Malthusian fantasies, utopian treaties and grandiose laws, the green movement will continue to be a drag on human progress — even as the computer models get better and the temperature goes up.At best, the green movement might be compared to an alarm clock: jangling shrilly to wake up the world. That is fair enough; they have turned our attention to a problem that needs to be carefully examined and dealt with. But the first thing you do when you wake up is to turn the alarm clock off; otherwise that shrill beeping noise will distract you from the problems of the day.The alarm clock will never understand this; making shrill and irrational noise is what alarm clocks do and is all they understand. But sensible and thoughtful people who want humanity to live fuller, richer lives in a cleaner and more sustainable world need to get past the naive and crude policy ideas that currently dominate green thinking and start giving these questions the serious attention and careful thought they deserve.
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| | Sujet: 2565 - NAACP Poised to Vote on Resolution Calling Tea Party 'Racist' 13/7/2010, 23:28 | |
| ... et poiurquoi pas! NAACP Poised to Vote on Resolution Calling Tea Party 'Racist'Published July 13, 2010| FoxNews.comThe NAACP is poised to vote Tuesday on a resolution to condemn the Tea Party movement as racist, despite claims from Tea Partiers that the measure is just a political ploy. - Spoiler:
 The audience applauds after first lady Michelle Obama speaks at the annual NAACP convention July 12 in Kansas City, Mo. (AP Photo)
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| | Sujet: 2566 - EXCLUSIVE: State Department Mulls Terror Designation for Gaza 'Aid' Ship Funder 15/7/2010, 00:09 | |
| Aaahhhaaa! en "cause"-t-on dans les media francophones? EXCLUSIVE: State Department Mulls Terror Designation for Gaza 'Aid' Ship FunderBy Ben EvanskyPublished July 14, 2010FoxNews.comThe State Department is investigating whether to designate the Turkish Muslim charity that funded and operated a Gaza-bound "aid" ship as a foreign terrorist organization, after nine people were killed aboard one of its ships in a bloody confrontation with Israeli commandos, Fox News has learned.- Spoiler:
 APMay 31: This image made from video provided by the Israeli Defence Force shows what the IDF says is one of several commandos being dropped onto the Mavi Marmara ship by helicopter in the Mediterranean Sea. Israeli commandos rappelled down to an aid flotilla sailing to thwart a Gaza blockade on Monday, clashing with pro-Palestinian activists on the lead ship in a raid that left at least nine passengers dead.
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| | | | Biloulou
 Nombre de messages : 54566
Localisation : Jardins suspendus sur la Woluwe - Belgique
Date d'inscription : 27/10/2008
| | Sujet: Re: Nouvelles en Langue Anglaise 15/7/2010, 06:58 | |
| - Sylvette a écrit:
- Aaahhhaaa! en "cause"-t-on dans les media francophones?
Bonjour Sylvette !  Pensez-vous !  Par contre on annonce en titre que l'enquête menée par Israël conclue à des fautes et manquements dans la préparation de l'interception par les autorités militaires. Ce qu'on oublie de dire, ou alors à la fin du corps du texte, c'est les conclusions du rapport : le commando d'interception aurait dû être plus nombreux et mieux armé pour neutraliser plus rapidement les "pacifistes" à bord, connaissant leur nombre et intentions. Il n'y aura pas de sanctions. L'inénarrable Charles Enderlin ajoute, déçu mais rassurant : "...mais il y aura d'autres enquêtes, indépendantes, celles-là" | |
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| | Sujet: 2568 - 15/7/2010, 07:01 | |
| Bonjour Biloulou!
Le fait qu'il n'y ait pas de sanction en dit long... on comprend le silence et la deception de certains! |
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| | Sujet: 2769 - Fox News Poll: Obama Job Approval Down, Few Think Stimulus Helped 15/7/2010, 21:33 | |
| Hey, Lawrence, le visionnaire...   Fox News Poll: Obama Job Approval Down, Few Think Stimulus HelpedBy Dana BlantonPublished July 15, 2010FoxNews.comMost Americans see little benefit from the federal government's economic stimulus plan, as President Obama's job performance rating drops overall, and hits a new low among Democrats.- Spoiler:
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July 15: President Obama's job performance rating has dropped overall and hit a new low among Democrats.
More than 6 in 10 American voters think the economy would be in the same or better shape if Congress hadn't passed the economic bill, while a small minority thinks things would be worse without it.If Congress had done nothing, the largest number of voters — 43 percent — say the economy would be in about the same shape as it is today. Another 22 percent think the economy would be in better shape without the stimulus plan. About a third — 31 percent — thinks the stimulus bill helped and the nation's economy would be in worse shape without it.Wednesday the White House said the $862 billion stimulus bill was responsible for saving or creating between 2.5 and 3.6 million jobs.The poll finds about a third of voters think the economic stimulus plan created "a lot" (5 percent) or "some" new jobs (29 percent). Twenty-three percent think the plan created "a few" jobs, while the biggest portion of voters — 40 percent — thinks the stimulus created "hardly any new jobs at all."What would voters do with the billions of dollars of stimulus money that remains unspent? Thirty-two percent would spend it on a small business program to create jobs, 28 percent would not spend it and use the money to reduce the deficit, while 20 percent would give it back to taxpayers in the form of tax cuts and 12 percent would use it to pay down the country's debt to China.More voters think Republican policies (41 percent) than Democratic policies (30 percent) are responsible for the current condition of the economy. Some 21 percent say both.In a July 9 economic speech in Missouri, Obama said, "It's a choice between the policies that got us in this mess in the first place and the policies that are getting us out of this mess."Voters are uncertain who can do that. Even though voters blame Republican policies for the current conditions, when asked which party's policies are more likely to "improve the condition of the country," views are closely divided: 40 percent say Republican policies and 37 percent say Democratic policies.Other highlights from the poll:
— By 64-27 percent, voters think the Bush tax cuts should be extended rather than allowed to expire, as they are set to do this year.— Most voters think the stock market will be at about the same level (47 percent) or higher (32 percent) a year from now. Few — 13 percent — think it will be lower.— Similarly, 30 percent think home values will be up next year and another 49 percent think they will be about the same as they are now. About one in five (18 percent) think housing prices will be lower.— Some 40 percent of voters approve and 51 percent disapprove of how the Obama administration is dealing with the oil spill. A month ago 38 percent approved and 51 percent disapproved (June 8-9).— Views are closely divided on whether there should be a temporary ban on deepwater drilling in the Gulf: 50 percent think it is a good idea, while nearly as many — 45 percent — think it's a bad idea.
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| | Sujet: 2570 - 16/7/2010, 11:51 | |
| Obama's next actBy Charles KrauthammerFriday, July 16, 2010 In the political marketplace, there's now a run on Obama shares. The left is disappointed with the president. Independents are abandoning him in droves. And the right is already dancing on his political grave, salivating about November when, his own press secretary admitted Sunday, Democrats might lose the House- Spoiler:
I have a warning for Republicans: Don't underestimate Barack Obama.
Consider what he has already achieved. Obamacare alone makes his presidency historic. It has irrevocably changed one-sixth of the economy, put the country inexorably on the road to national health care and, as acknowledged by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus but few others, begun one of the most massive wealth redistributions in U.S. history.
Second, there is major financial reform, which passed Congress on Thursday. Economists argue whether it will prevent meltdowns and bailouts as promised. But there is no argument that it will give the government unprecedented power in the financial marketplace. Its 2,300 pages will create at least 243 new regulations that will affect not only, as many assume, the big banks but just about everyone, including, as noted in one summary (the Wall Street Journal), "storefront check cashiers, city governments, small manufacturers, home buyers and credit bureaus."
Third is the near $1 trillion stimulus, the largest spending bill in U.S. history. And that's not even counting nationalizing the student loan program, regulating carbon emissions by Environmental Protection Agency fiat, and still-fitful attempts to pass cap-and-trade through Congress.
But Obama's most far-reaching accomplishment is his structural alteration of the U.S. budget. The stimulus, the vast expansion of domestic spending, the creation of ruinous deficits as far as the eye can see are not easily reversed.
These are not mere temporary countercyclical measures. They are structural deficits because, as everyone from Obama on down admits, the real money is in entitlements, most specifically Medicare and Medicaid. But Obamacare freezes these out as a source of debt reduction. Obamacare's $500 billion in Medicare cuts and $600 billion in tax increases are siphoned away for a new entitlement -- and no longer available for deficit reduction.
The result? There just isn't enough to cut elsewhere to prevent national insolvency. That will require massive tax increases -- most likely a European-style value-added tax. Just as President Ronald Reagan cut taxes to starve the federal government and prevent massive growth in spending, Obama's wild spending -- and quarantining health-care costs from providing possible relief -- will necessitate huge tax increases.
The net effect of 18 months of Obamaism will be to undo much of Reaganism. Both presidencies were highly ideological, grandly ambitious and often underappreciated by their own side. In his early years, Reagan was bitterly attacked from his right. (Typical Washington Post headline: "For Reagan and the New Right, the Honeymoon Is Over" -- and that was six months into his presidency!) Obama is attacked from his left for insufficient zeal on gay rights, immigration reform, closing Guantanamo -- the list is long. The critics don't understand the big picture. Obama's transformational agenda is a play in two acts.
Act One is over. The stimulus, Obamacare, financial reform have exhausted his first-term mandate. It will bear no more heavy lifting. And the Democrats will pay the price for ideological overreaching by losing one or both houses, whether de facto or de jure. The rest of the first term will be spent consolidating these gains (writing the regulations, for example) and preparing for Act Two.
The next burst of ideological energy -- massive regulation of the energy economy, federalizing higher education and "comprehensive" immigration reform (i.e., amnesty) -- will require a second mandate, meaning reelection in 2012.
That's why there's so much tension between Obama and congressional Democrats. For Obama, 2010 matters little. If Democrats lose control of one or both houses, Obama will probably have an easier time in 2012, just as Bill Clinton used Newt Gingrich and the Republicans as the foil for his 1996 reelection campaign.
Obama is down, but it's very early in the play. Like Reagan, he came here to do things. And he's done much in his first 500 days. What he has left to do he knows must await his next 500 days -- those that come after reelection.
The real prize is 2012. Obama sees far, farther than even his own partisans. Republicans underestimate him at their peril.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com
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| | Sujet: 2571 - Financial Reform, R.I.P. 16/7/2010, 12:45 | |
| Si j'ai toujours pense que Barack Hussein Obama et ceux qui le soutiennent n'ont absolument pas l'interet des Etats Unis a coeur, les faits depuis 1 an et demi ne peuvent que confirmer cette triste conviction.
Leur but (celui du POTUS, de sa femme, de son "pasteur/ami/mentor, de ses conseillers, de l'extreme-gauche qui le soutient - aucun d'eux ne l'a vraiment jamais cache, si la pluspart des Americains qui n'a pas forcement le temps de suivre la politique de tres pres, l'a manque): la mise en place d'une ideologie mondiale de gauche, celle-ci devant passer par la chute des Etats Unis de sa place de leader. La meilleure facon: s'assurer qu'elle ne se remettra jamais de ses dettes on continuant a depenser.
Il ne faut pas oublier les excuses continues d'Obama pour la facon dont les Etats Unis se sont comportes dans l'histoire, la these de Michele Obama dans laquelle elle expliquait a quelle point elle detestait se retrouver entouree de Blancs (alors que toutes ses etudes avaient ete payees largement par ceux-ci), les sermons de haine envers l'Amerique de Jeremiah Wright, l'extremisme de gauche de tous ceux qui entourent le POTUS, etc...)
Les democraties occidentales ont du souci a se faire.
The Main Street Journal
Financial Reform, R.I.P.
James S. Henry and Laurence Kotlikoff
07.15.10, 01:20 PM EDT
The Dodd-Frank bill does nothing to deal with Wall Street's central problem: systemic non-disclosure.
[spoiler]
So long Glass-Steagall. Hello Dodd-Frank--the most comprehensive rewrite of financial rules since 1933. This 2,319-page colossus--10 times the length of Glass-Steagall--took 1.5 years to produce and will cost $30 billion and many more years to implement. Will all this time and treasure make Wall Street safe for Main Street?
No.
Dodd-Frank is a full-employment act for regulators that addresses everything but the root causes of the financial collapse. It serves up a dog's breakfast covering proprietary trading, consumer financial protection, derivatives trading, executive pay, credit card fees, whistle-blowers, minority inclusion and Congolese minerals. Dodd-Frank also mandates 68 new studies of carbon markets, Chinese drywalls, and person-to-person lending, and many other irrelevancies.
Root Causes
None of this deals with the central problem--Wall Street's ability to hide behind claims of proprietary information to facilitate the production and sale of trillions of dollars in securities whose true values are almost impossible for outsiders to determine.
This policy of "systematic non-disclosure"--the absence of complete transparency about what financial firms really owe and are owed--left only its CEOs and their top consiglieres in a position to know what their companies really owned and owed. Consequently, the valuation of Wall Street firms came down to trusting the bank's senior executives--those who often had the greatest stakes in the non-disclosure system. As news of all this widespread Wall Street chicanery spread, investors eventually realized that the "grownups"--rating companies, boards of directors, regulators, and politicians--had been well-paid to look the other way. So public trust took a holiday. Wall Street's house of cards collapsed, taking Main Street down in the process. Nothing will change on Wall Steet without implementing a version of the Glass-Steagall Act in addition to requiring transparency on balance sheets and the SEC demanding the regulation of derivatives
All this malfeasance was no organized conspiracy, but a self-organizing, automatically expanding gravy train. Its participants included many of the world's largest and most prestigious banks, insurance companies, [url=http://topics.forbes.com/hedge funds]hedge funds[/url], credit raters, law firms and [url=http://topics.forbes.com/accounting firms]accounting firms[/url].
What share of financial institutions' assets and liabilities were fundamentally toxic may never be known. But that is beside the point. With no way to independently verify, in real time, the precise nature of financial firms' assets and liabilities, they are all vulnerable to panics by investors, counterparties, and depositors, based on rumors and speculation as well as fact.
The resulting serial collapse of Wall Street behemoths, in turn, led Uncle Sam to step in and issue his own brand of increasingly hard-to-value securities--some $24 trillion (according to Neal Barofsky, Congress' TARP watchdog) in contingent guarantees to all manner of financial companies.
This is a colossal liability, more than twice U.S. gross domestic product. If another massive [url=http://topics.forbes.com/bank run]bank run[/url] hit Wall Street--say, next week--Uncle Sam would be forced to print trillions to cover these guarantees. The prospect of getting paid back in watered-down dollars might then lead people to run even faster to the banks, to get their money and buy something tangible before prices skyrocket. Ultimately, Uncle Sam's guarantees are only worth what they are written on--paper.
So Uncle Sam didn't lead us out of the woods; he led us deeper into the woods. While he (temporarily) saved Wall Street, he may have gravely endangered Main Street.
Meanwhile, many major players on Wall Street have been laughing all the way from their banks. One top banker after another has been able to leave office with their generous golden parachutes, starter castles and yachts intact.
In contrast, during the 1930s, Citibank's CEO and the head of the [url=http://topics.forbes.com/New York Stock Exchange]New York Stock Exchange[/url] did serious jail time for financial peccadilloes; in the late 1980s, the S&L crisis led to more than 1,000 felony convictions. This time around, aside from blatant thieves like Bernie Madoff and "Sir" Alan Stanford, we've been more forgiving. Of course Dodd-Frank does instruct the [url=http://topics.forbes.com/U.S. Sentencing Commission]U.S. Sentencing Commission[/url] to re-examine its guidelines for financial fraudsters, but sentencing presumes conviction.
Yet the real criminal that needs to stand trial is this: our phony system of systematic non-disclosure about what financial firms are really worth. Far from streamlining regulations, mandating greater transparency, and reducing uncertainty, Dodd-Frank provides government bureaucrats with unrestricted hunting licenses. Only one of the roughly 115 federal and state agencies currently involved in financial regulation has been consolidated. At the same time, the new law creates 12 new regulatory bodies and gives them vast amounts of rule-making discretion. In the next two years these and other financial regulators will hold an estimated 243 new rule-making procedures.
The new law still provides no single regulator for deposit-taking institutions. The SEC and the CFTC continue to share authority over derivatives. A toothless National Insurance Office will "gather information" from 50 state regulators; the Fed's new Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection will have to tip toe around the SEC, the FTC, and the Federal housing agencies; a new SEC Credit Rating Agency Board will try to rate credit raters; the Fed also gets unfettered discretion to delay implementation of the Volcker Rule until 2023, and .... you don't want to know.
Dodd-Frank is not just a prescription for regulatory sclerosis. It is a bonanza for Wall Street lobbyists and lawyers, who will help determine what this law's 283,985 words actually mean.
In 1990-2009 Wall Street and its friends in the insurance and real estate industries spent an average of $2,973 (in 2010 dollars) per congressman and senator per day on campaign contributions and lobbying. All this spending kept full financial disclosure off the table and helped today's top 10 financial giants to dominate the industry.
Paths Not Taken
In 1982 seven people died in Chicago from consuming Tylenol tainted with cyanide by some criminal who is yet to be caught. Overnight, Johnson & Johnson ( JNJ - news - people ) found no market for its global 30 million bottles of Tylenol. Talk about a toxic asset!
J&J recalled all 30 million bottles, threw them away, and replaced them with safety-sealed bottles. In so doing, it disclosed the contents to be Tylenol not cyanide. Its toxic asset problem was solved for good.
Dodd-Frank's approach is different. This law is akin to J&J restocking the shelves with the same unsealed bottles, hiring thousands of people to randomly inspect drug store aisles in the hope of catching the miscreant, and contracting with funeral companies to quickly pick up the dead. Indeed, a major part of Dodd-Frank focuses on arranging speedier funerals for failing financial institutions rather than preventing such funerals in the first place. Dodd-Frank also relies heavily on the failed "good bank"-"bad bank" model of regulation. In this model, "bad banks" that take extra risks will be allowed to fail, while "good banks" are protected.
Earth to Congress! We tried this in September 2008. "Bad bank" Lehman was allowed to fail, which blew up in Uncle Sam's face. Citigroup ( C - news - people ), a "good" bank, would have failed but for a bailout; Goldman Sachs ( GS - news - people ), a "bad bank," might have failed had Uncle Sam not intervened indirectly. AIG ( AIG - news - people ) wasn't even a bank. But it was bad, and it was saved. When push comes to shove, this regulatory ring-fence never works.
The Right Financial Fix
Were we really serious about fixing our financial system, there's a very simple alternative--Limited Purpose Banking. LPB would transform all financial intermediaries with limited liability into mutual fund companies. Under LPB a single regulatory agency--the "Federal Financial Authority"--would organize the independent rating, verification, custody and full disclosure of all securities held by the mutual funds.
Voilà, by dint of competition and transparency, "liar loans," off-balance sheet gimmickry, and toxic assets would all disappear. LPB would let the financial sector do only what Main Street needs it to do--connect lenders to borrowers and savers to investors.
The financial sector's job is not to take taxpayers to the casino and collect the winnings. This kind of "cowboy capitalism" is far too dangerous to maintain. But Dodd-Frank does precisely this, albeit with many more regulatory cops on the beat.
In contrast, LPB would put an end to Wall Street's gambling with taxpayer chips. Since mutual funds are, in effect, small banks with 100% [url=http://topics.forbes.com/capital requirements]capital requirements[/url] in all circumstances, they can never fail. Neither can their holding companies. Under LPB, financial crises and the massive damage they inflict on the entire (global) economy would become a thing of the past.
Of course, there would be losers. Some Wall Street executives might have to find employment in [url=http://topics.forbes.com/Las Vegas]Las Vegas[/url] or offshore banks. Some lobbyists, lawyers, credit analysts and accountants might need to find higher callings. Some politicians might even have to solicit more support from Main Street.
Alas, Dodd-Frank bears no resemblance to Limited Purpose Banking. But bad laws don't always last, and this one may eventually lead us to LPB by showing us precisely what not to do--if we ever get another chance.
James S. Henry is an economist, lawyer, and investigative journalist and former chief economist for McKinsey & Co. He is the author of Banqueros y Lavadolares (1996),The Blood Bankers (2005), and Pirate Bankers (forthcoming). Laurence J. Kotlikoff is a professor of economics at [url=http://topics.forbes.com/Boston University]Boston University[/url] and author of Jimmy Stewart Is Dead--Ending the World's Financial Plague with Limited Purpose Banking. |
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| | Sujet: 2572 - 16/7/2010, 13:24 | |
| J'oubliais d'ajouter un facteur important pendant la premiere annee, critiquer le POTUS etait etre raciste, peu ont ose braver ce risque. Maintenant enfin, et meme si de temps a autres certains de ses supporters utilisent encore cette arme, les faits sont la, alors difficile de refuser de les reconnaitre. Mais quand meme, on continue a nous dire que si les resultats de sondage montrent un desaccord des Americains pour la politique du POTUS, ils continuent de "bien l'aimer" en tant que personne. En opposition a la haine acharnee contre Bush, je suppose. Mais bon, la, homme blanc chretien conservateur/Republicains... "on" avait toutes les excuses. |
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| | Sujet: 2573 - 16/7/2010, 13:54 | |
| Ah ben tiens justement, en parlant de ces affreux racistes  : Liberal Press Says Panther Story Trumped Up
Video - O'Reilly |
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| | Sujet: 2574 - Rep. Maxine Waters of California probably broke ethics rules, House panel finds 3/8/2010, 13:13 | |
| Toujours dans la categorie: Breath-in/Breath-out... Un bol d'air frais Democrate Obamien Apres Charlie Rangel, grand ami de Nancy  (qui doit choisir entre partir sur la pointe des pieds ou faire face a un proces public peu ragoutant), Maxine Waters prend la releve... Oh Maxine, Maxine, comment peuvent-ils etre arrives a une telle conclusion! Ca ne peut etre que la fote de Republicins racistes. Rep. Maxine Waters of California probably broke ethics rules, House panel findsBy Paul Kane and Ben PershingWashington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 3, 2010 An ethics report released Monday found that Rep. Maxine Waters probably broke conflict-of-interest rules in urging federal aid for a bank where her husband had served on the board and owned hundreds of thousands of dollars in stock- Spoiler:
The California Democrat, a member of the Financial Services Committee, denied any wrongdoing and said she will not settle with the House ethics committee, most likely meaning a second public trial of a leading Democrat this fall. Rep. Charles B. Rangel (N.Y.) is set to stand trial on allegations that he broke congressional rules with his personal finances and with his fundraising efforts for a New York college.
The twin scandals and expected trials further complicate what was already expected to be a difficult midterm election year for Democrats. Although Waters and Rangel represent solidly Democratic districts, Republicans are holding them forth as examples of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's inability to live up to her pledge to run the "most ethical Congress in history." The GOP has made ethics reform and legislative transparency part of its pitch to try to reclaim the majority in November.
Pelosi (D-Calif.) echoed her stance on the Rangel matter, offering a muted response that suggested the Waters case showed that the ethics panel is doing its job of policing the House.
"As we have said in the past about the process, ethics proceedings are a result of a bipartisan, confidential and independent process in the House," Nadeam Elshami, Pelosi's spokesman, said in a statement.
Although Rangel's legal team continues to hope that it can reach a settlement and avoid a trial on 13 counts of violating House rules by acknowledging some wrongdoing, Waters signaled that she thinks a public airing would be the only chance to clear her name.
"I have not violated any House rules," she said in a statement.
"Therefore, I simply will not be forced to admit to something I did not do. . . . The record will clearly show that in advocating on behalf of minority banks, neither my office nor I benefited in any way, engaged in improper action or influenced anyone."
The ethics committee took two key steps Monday. It announced that the subcommittee that had been investigating Waters concluded it had a reason to believe she violated the chamber's conflict-of-interest rules, and it established a new eight-member subcommittee to hold a trial.
The committee also released an 80-page report that was prepared last August by the quasi-independent Office of Congressional Ethics, which serves as a preliminary investigator and recommends to the full House ethics committee whether it should pursue matters.
The case revolves around Waters's role in arranging meetings between Treasury Department officials and executives of minority-owned OneUnited Bank and whether her intent was to broadly benefit minority-owned financial firms represented by the National Bankers Association (NBA) or simply to aid Boston-based OneUnited.
OneUnited suffered during the collapse of the mortgage industry because it had invested heavily in shares of federal mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and at one point in the fall of 2008 it was seeking close to $100 million from Treasury for those shares.
Waters's husband, Sidney Williams, had served on the board of directors of OneUnited and owned $350,000 to $750,000 in the bank's stock at the end of 2008. Disclosure forms for 2009 show similar holdings.
Twice in September 2008, Waters approached Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) to discuss OneUnited's pursuit of federal assistance. According to Frank's testimony, she acknowledged a potential conflict: "Sidney's been on the board."
Frank told the investigators that he did not want Waters involved in the OneUnited issue. "Stay out of it," he said he told her.
"Representative Waters told [Frank] that she was in a predicament because her husband had been involved in the bank, but 'OneUnited people' were coming to her for help," the report states.
In an interview Monday, Frank emphasized that his motivation for warning Waters away from the issue was because he was already aware of the financial problems of the bank in his home town. "It was something I was working on independent of her," he said.
In December 2008, after correspondence between bank officials and Waters's staff, OneUnited received $12.1 million from the Troubled Assets Relief Program.
The preliminary investigation by the ethics office included interviews with former Treasury secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., who told investigators that he agreed to have his senior aides meet with OneUnited's executives after receiving a call from Waters, believing it would be a meeting involving many minority bankers. Paulson told investigators he called Waters after the meeting to ask why only OneUnited officials were present.
Based on interviews with Paulson, Waters, her staff and others, the preliminary report said "the discussion at the meeting centered on a single bank -- OneUnited."
Waters said Monday that the meeting was requested "on behalf of the NBA, not on behalf of OneUnited Bank."
According to the report, three bank executives attended the meeting: one from the NBA and two from OneUnited, one of whom had just been selected chairman of the NBA. He was there to advocate on behalf of the association's members as well as OneUnited, he is quoted as saying in the report.
Waters, a 20-year House member from South Central Los Angeles, also maintained that her actions did not directly result in OneUnited or anyone else receiving federal money and that she received no personal benefit.
Because the House adjourned Friday for a nearly seven-week break, no public action is expected in the Rangel or Waters cases until Congress returns.
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| | Sujet: 2575 - Morning Bell: It’s About The Spending, Speaker 3/8/2010, 13:33 | |
| L'arrogance de la gauche, les lois passees "sous" le POTUS et Nancy pour le bien des Americains. Ils n'ont seulement pas encore bien compris. Morning Bell: It's about the Spending, SpeakerPosted August 2nd, 2010 at 9:30am in EntitlementsYesterday on ABC's This Week, host Christiane Amanpour asked Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA): "You are, by all accounts, one of the most -- if not the most -- powerful and successful speakers of -- in the history of the United States. You've passed so much legislation. The President was elected with a significant majority. You had control of both houses of Congress. And yet now, people are talking about you might lose your majority in the House. The gap seems to be growing wider between what's achieved and what's making an impact with the people. How did this happen? ...how did you get to this place where, perhaps, you might lose your majority?" Pelosi responded: "We don't see it that way. We are very proud of the agenda that we have put forth to the American people." ... |
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| | Sujet: 2576 - Annals of executive overreach 6/8/2010, 13:00 | |
| Comme j'ai deja eu l'occasion de l'ecrire a plusieurs occasions...  Il fera tout pour etre reelu en 2012! et alors gare... si on pense que les mains mises sur le secteur prive du son premier mandat etaient graves, il se fera un plaisir de finir de mettre les Etats Unis a genoux. Annals of executive overreachBy Charles KrauthammerFriday, August 6, 2010 Last week, a draft memo surfaced from the Department of Homeland Security suggesting ways to administratively circumvent existing law to allow several categories of illegal immigrants to avoid deportation and, indeed, for some to be granted permanent residency. Most disturbing was the stated rationale. This was being proposed "in the absence of Comprehensive Immigration Reform." In other words, because Congress refuses to do what these bureaucrats would like to see done, they will legislate it themselves. - Spoiler:
Regardless of your feelings on the substance of the immigration issue, this is not how a constitutional democracy should operate. Administrators administer the law, they don't change it. That's the legislators' job.
When questioned, the White House played down the toxic memo, leaving the impression that it was nothing more than ruminations emanating from the bowels of Homeland Security. But the administration is engaged in an even more significant power play elsewhere.
A 2007 Supreme Court ruling gave the Environmental Protection Agency the authority to regulate carbon emissions if it could demonstrate that they threaten human health and the environment. The Obama EPA made precisely that finding, thereby granting itself a huge expansion of power and, noted The Post, sending "a message to Congress."
It was not a terribly subtle message: Enact cap-and-trade legislation -- taxing and heavily regulating carbon-based energy -- or the EPA will do so unilaterally. As Frank O'Donnell of Clean Air Watch noted, such a finding "is likely to help light a fire under Congress to get moving."
Well, Congress didn't. Despite the "regulatory cudgel" (to again quote The Post) the administration has been waving, the Senate has repeatedly refused to acquiesce.
Good for the Senate. But what to do when the executive is passively aggressive rather than actively so? Take border security. Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) reports that President Obama told him about pressure from his political left and its concern that if the border is secured, Republicans will have no incentive to support comprehensive reform (i.e., amnesty). Indeed, Homeland Security's abandonment of the "virtual fence" on the southern border, combined with its lack of interest in completing the real fence that today covers only one-third of the border, gives the distinct impression that serious border enforcement is not a high administration priority absent some Republican quid pro quo on comprehensive reform.
But border enforcement is not something to be manipulated in return for legislative favors. It is, as the administration vociferously argued in court in the Arizona case, the federal executive's constitutional responsibility. Its job is to faithfully execute the laws. Non-execution is a dereliction of duty.
This contagion of executive willfulness is not confined to the federal government or to Democrats. In Virginia, the Republican attorney general has just issued a ruling allowing police to ask about one's immigration status when stopped for some other reason (e.g., a traffic violation). Heretofore, police could inquire only upon arrest and imprisonment.
Whatever your views about the result, the process is suspect. If police latitude regarding the interrogation of possible illegal immigrants is to be expanded, that's an issue for the legislature, not the executive.
How did we get here? I blame Henry Paulson. (Such a versatile sentence.) The gold standard of executive overreach was achieved the day he summoned the heads of the country's nine largest banks and informed them that henceforth the federal government was their business partner. The banks were under no legal obligation to obey. But they know the capacity of the federal government, when crossed, to cause you trouble, endless trouble. They complied.
So did BP when the president summoned its top executives to the White House to demand a $20 billion federally administered escrow fund for damages. Existing law capped damages at $75 million. BP, like the banks, understood the power of the U.S. government. Twenty billion it was.
Again, you can be pleased with the result (I was) and still be troubled by how we got there. Everyone wants energy in the executive (as Alexander Hamilton called it). But not lawlessness. In the modern welfare state, government has the power to regulate your life. That's bad enough. But at least there is one restraint on this bloated power: the separation of powers. Such constraints on your life must first be approved by both houses of Congress.
That's called the consent of the governed. The constitutional order is meant to subject you to the will of the people's representatives, not to the whim of a chief executive or the imagination of a loophole-seeking bureaucrat.
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| | Sujet: 2577 - Will the GOP Storm the Statehouses? 6/8/2010, 14:21 | |
| Will the GOP Storm the Statehouses? Expect to see a lot of Republican governors elected in November. By KARL ROVE It must have been gloomy for Democrats when the nation's governors met last month in Boston for their annual summer get-together. The reason: If congressional races look bad for Democrats, the 37 gubernatorial contests are even worse. - Spoiler:
A quick survey of the political landscape shows six of the seven Democratic governors running for re-election are polling under 50% and in danger of losing, while all six GOP incumbents seeking re-election are expected to win. In the 24 open gubernatorial contests, Republicans lead in 15 and are tied in three others. More than half of Americans are likely to have a new chief executive for their state come November. Democrats are burdened by President Barack Obama's low approval ratings and, in some open races, by widespread public dissatisfaction with the state's retiring Democratic incumbent.  Associated Press Mississippi Gov. Haley BarbourThat's not to say the GOP has had all smooth sailing. In Colorado, plagiarism charges have crippled Republican frontrunner Scott McInnis. Less dangerously, Florida Republicans are locked in a bitter primary. But these are the exceptions. The GOP's edge in statehouse contests could have major ramifications for a long time to come, including next year's redistricting of the House of Representatives. The more GOP governors, the stronger Republican dominance of the process will be. Eighteen of the 21 states that could add or lose congressional seats have governors' races this fall. There also will be a lot more Republican legislators after November to help draw redistricting lines for the coming decade.Republicans are poised to elect a new generation of leaders. After this fall's election, the GOP could have two Indian-American, two Hispanic, and as many as seven women governors. This would provide powerful evidence of the GOP's diversity and help refurbish the party's image. About Karl Rove Karl Rove served as Senior Advisor to President George W. Bush from 2000–2007 and Deputy Chief of Staff from 2004–2007. At the White House he oversaw the Offices of Strategic Initiatives, Political Affairs, Public Liaison, and Intergovernmental Affairs and was Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, coordinating the White House policy-making process.Before Karl became known as "The Architect" of President Bush's 2000 and 2004 campaigns, he was president of Karl Rove + Company, an Austin-based public affairs firm that worked for Republican candidates, nonpartisan causes, and nonprofit groups. His clients included over 75 Republican U.S. Senate, Congressional and gubernatorial candidates in 24 states, as well as the Moderate Party of Sweden.Karl writes a weekly op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, is a Newsweek columnist and is the author of the forthcoming book "Courage and Consequence" (Threshold Editions).Email the author atKarl@Rove.comor visit him on the web atRove.com. Or, you can send a Tweet to @karlrove.More importantly, the GOP's crop of new governors can demonstrate that conservative ideas work. Just as GOP governors helped lay the foundation for the Republican resurgence in 1994 by pursuing far-reaching reform of welfare, education and taxes, so could new policy-minded chief executives reinvigorate the Republican Party's reputation as the "party of ideas." Already, the GOP victors in last year's gubernatorial contests are providing powerful contrasts to Mr. Obama's policies. Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell erased his state's nearly $2 billion deficit without raising taxes. Facing a $13 billion shortfall, a hostile Democratic legislature and more than $7 million in negative ads launched against him by labor unions, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie nonetheless balanced the budget while cutting taxes.Governors also have far more electoral impact on their states than do distant, often-absent senators and congressmen. Since 1994, Republicans have won 26 Senate seats previously held by Democrats. Twenty of those pickups were in states with an incumbent Republican governor or a GOP gubernatorial candidate who won that same day. Governors matter even more when it comes to picking a president. When George W. Bush won the White House in 2000, there were GOP chief executives in nearly every important battleground, helping move swing states like West Virginia, Tennessee and Arkansas into his column. By comparison, the only major swing-state the GOP controlled in 2008 was Florida. The GOP wave is so strong right now that Republicans could simultaneously win the governorships in the critical Great Lake battlegrounds of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and Illinois. And the GOP is likely to win the governorship in other presidential battlegrounds like Iowa, Nevada, New Mexico and Oregon. If this comes to pass, it will be no accident. Under the remarkable leadership of the Republican Governors Association chairman, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, and his wunderkind executive director Nick Ayers, the RGA has turned into a political juggernaut.At the end of June, the RGA had $40 million in cash, even after spending nearly $11 million earlier this year to aid GOP challengers. In Ohio, for example, the RGA spent $2.8 million to blunt a $3 million Democratic effort to trash former Ohio Congressman John Kasich. Mr. Kasich now leads Democrat incumbent Ted Strickland by eight points.And in Wisconsin, the RGA has helped put Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker ahead of Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett by eight points in the latest Rasmussen poll by outspending the Democrats 3 to 1 on television ads.Political change comes more powerfully from the bottom up, not from the top down. The election of reform-oriented conservative Republican governors can shake America's political firmament. It would have profound implications on the GOP's reputation and the outcome of the 2012 election.Mr. Rove, the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush, is the author of "Courage and Consequence" (Threshold Editions, 2010).
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| | Sujet: 2578 - Show Me ObamaCare 6/8/2010, 14:26 | |
| La democratie revue et corrigee par les democrates obamiens. Show Me ObamaCare Despite a voter rebuke, how an obscure mandate will reshape health care.The political revolt against ObamaCare came to Missouri Tuesday, with voters casting ballots three to one against the plan in its first direct referendum. This is another resounding health-care rebuke to the White House and Democrats, not that overwhelming public opposition to this expansion of government power ever deterred them before.- Spoiler:
 Senior Editorial Writer Joseph Rago reports on the Missouri results.Missouri's Proposition C annulled the "individual mandate" within state lines, or the requirement that everyone buy insurance or else pay a tax. Liberals are trying to wave off this embarrassment, but that is hard to do when the split was 71.1% in favor in a state John McCain won by a mere 0.1% margin. The anti-ObamaCare measure carried every county save St. Louis and Kansas City with 668,000 votes, yet just 578,000 Republicans cast a ballot in the concurrent primaries.If the practical effects of this conflict between state and federal law are likely to be limited, more importantly, Missouri's vote revealed once again that the country is still aghast over President Obama's health-care presumption. Earlier this week, the Congressional Research Service reported that the new bureaucracy the bill created is so complex and indiscriminate that its size is "currently unknowable." Capitol Hill's independent policy arm added that among "the dozens of new governmental organizations or advisory bodies," it is "impossible to know how much influence they will ultimately have."  Associated Press No wonder Missourians rebelled, as with voters in Massachusetts, New Jersey and Virginia last year. There will be more such what-have-they-done ObamaCare moments. Wait until the public discovers the government is now literally determining what qualifies as "health care" in America.That isn't a typo. ObamaCare mandates that insurers spend a certain percentage of premium dollars on benefits, but Democrats never got around to writing the fine print of what counts as a benefit. So a handful of regulators are now choosing among the tens of thousands of services that doctors, hospitals and insurers offer. Few other government decisions will do more to shape tomorrow's health market, or what's left of it.This command-and-control mechanism is the bill's mandate for insurance "medical loss ratios" (MLR) of 85% for large employers and 80% for small businesses and individuals. The MLR is an accounting statistic that measures the share of premiums paid out in patient claims ("losses"). In the individual market, MLRs typically run between 65% and 75%, and Democrats like Jay Rockefeller and Al Franken think this is evidence of excessive profits, executive pay, marketing and other supposedly wasteful overhead.The same mentality prevails in the Administration, so it may well adopt a narrow definition of medical expenses when it issues final regulations by early fall. The insurance industry is lobbying for a less rigid standard: It will be easier to run a business and turn a profit if more of the costs are considered truly medical in nature. More notable is that people partial to ObamaCare but largely outside of politics are coming to understand the mess Congress has created. To wit, much of health care's intellectual energy is moving toward a concept called the "accountable care organization," which would replace today's fragmented delivery system of mostly solo practitioners with teams of doctors and hospitals working together. These integrated groups would manage and coordinate care, use more information technology and try to improve treatment quality for chronic disease and complex conditions.Yet "it isn't easy to draw a bright line, or even a fuzzy line, between traditional health services and some of the more innovative coordinated models," says Mark McClellan of the Brookings Institution and a leading accountable care proponent. The new model would rely on many tools that aren't strictly medical, like, say, a checkup or a CT scan.For example, how to classify a program to double-check doctors orders to avoid one of the unnecessary surgeries that kill some 12,000 people every year? Or counseling, calls, emails and other types of case management to make sure patients comply with their diabetes regimen? Or investments in electronic medical records? Obviously these programs aren't the same as an O.R. visit, but they still cost money, often a lot of it, and many insurance programs pay or are starting to pay for them.The possibility that these will be written out of the MLR definition is feeding a growing unease about politics shaping medicine more than it already does. The California Association of Physician Groups, the largest U.S. accountable care trade group, recently protested that a narrow MLR ruling "would create a disincentive for plans to contract with our members and undercut the coordinated care model." Health Integrated, a respected medical consulting firm, urged regulators "to avoid discouraging or inadvertently extinguishing the successful innovation that (so frequently) arises only from a plan's ability to try new ideas." Even North Dakota's Democratic Rep. Earl Pomeroy, who voted for the bill, argues that tight MLR regulation "could have a chilling effect on future innovative programs." "The real question is the overall philosophical thrust, which will determine the long-term direction of health care," Mr. McClellan says of the coming definition. The regulatory debate is dominated by Senator Rockefeller and others on the left who are still angry they never got a public option and are trying to use MLR as a proxy for controlling the insurance industry. The irony is that the new health models they claim to favor may be collateral damage, even as insurers take the fall for the problems Congress created.Another danger concerns the individual market, where a wave of destruction could be imminent. If the MLR definition is so arbitrary that health plans can't cover their claims and expenses, they'll simply withdraw that book of business. Mila Kofman, Maine's insurance superintendent and an ObamaCare supporter, warned that "the federal standard may disrupt our individual health insurance market" and is seeking an exemption. Her protest is all the more notable given that Maine's health regulations closely resemble those that are about to be imposed nationwide.Ms. Kofman and others are right to worry. In the 1990s, an MLR crackdown in Washington state caused the individual market to collapse in 36 of 39 counties. Too bad for the people with coverage today who were promised they could keep it if they liked it.This fight over medical loss ratios is an early taste of how a "government takeover" operates in practice. The state insurance commissioners advising the federal government—and who know something about the business—have already missed several deadlines because writing a uniform definition of medicine is "time consuming," while a wrong move would "destabilize the marketplace and significantly limit consumer choices."We predicted that under ObamaCare politicians and technocrats would dominate medicine, and here they come. Without more Missouri-style revolts—or perhaps in spite of them—the rest of us will soon learn how competent they really are.
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| | Sujet: 2579 - 20/8/2010, 15:45 | |
| Moral myopia at Ground Zero By Charles KrauthammerFriday, August 20, 2010 It's hard to be an Obama sycophant these days. Your hero delivers a Ramadan speechroundly supporting the building of a mosque and Islamic center near Ground Zero in New York. Your heart swells and you're moved to declare this President Obama's finest hour, his act of greatest courage. - Spoiler:
It's hard to be an Obama sycophant these days. Your hero delivers a Ramadan speechroundly supporting the building of a mosque and Islamic center near Ground Zero in New York. Your heart swells and you're moved to declare this President Obama's finest hour, his act of greatest courage.
Alas, the next day, at a remove of 800 miles, Obama explains that he was only talking about the legality of the thing and not the wisdom -- upon which he does not make, and will not make, any judgment.
You're left looking like a fool because now Obama has said exactly nothing: No one disputes the right to build; the whole debate is about the propriety, the decency of doing so.
It takes no courage whatsoever to bask in the applause of a Muslim audience as you promise to stand stoutly for their right to build a mosque, giving the unmistakable impression that you endorse the idea. What takes courage is to then respectfully ask that audience to reflect upon the wisdom of the project and to consider whether the imam's alleged goal of interfaith understanding might not be better achieved by accepting the New York governor's offer to help find another site.
Where the president flagged, however, the liberal intelligentsia stepped in with gusto, penning dozens of pro-mosque articles characterized by a frenzied unanimity, little resort to argument and a singular difficulty dealing with analogies.
The Atlantic's Michael Kinsley was typical in arguing that the only possible grounds for opposing the Ground Zero mosque are bigotry or demagoguery. Well then, what about Pope John Paul II's ordering the closing of the Carmelite convent just outside Auschwitz? (Surely there can be no one more innocent of that crime than those devout nuns.) How does Kinsley explain this remarkable demonstration of sensitivity, this order to pray -- but not there? He doesn't even feign analysis. He simply asserts that the decision is something "I confess that I never did understand."
That's his Q.E.D.? Is he stumped or is he inviting us to choose between his moral authority and that of one of the towering moral figures of the 20th century?
At least Richard Cohen of The Post tries to grapple with the issue of sanctity and sensitivity. The results, however, are not pretty. He concedes that putting up a Japanese cultural center at Pearl Harbor would be offensive but then dismisses the analogy to Ground Zero because 9/11 was merely "a rogue act, committed by 20 or so crazed samurai."
Obtuseness of this magnitude can only be deliberate. These weren't crazies. They were methodical, focused, steel-nerved operatives.
Nor were they freelance rogues. They were the leading, and most successful, edge of a worldwide movement of radical Islamists with cells in every continent, with worldwide financial and theological support, with a massive media and propaganda arm, and with an archipelago of local sympathizers, as in northwestern Pakistan, who protect and guard them.
Why is America fighting Predator wars in Pakistan and Yemen, surveilling thousands of conversations and financial transactions every day, and engaged in military operations against radical Muslims everywhere from the Philippines to Somalia -- because of 19 crazies, all of whom died nine years ago?
Radical Islam is not, by any means, a majority of Islam. But with its financiers, clerics, propagandists, trainers, leaders, operatives and sympathizers -- according to a conservative estimate, it commands the allegiance of 7 percent of Muslims, i.e., more than 80 million souls -- it is a very powerful strain within Islam. It has changed the course of nations and affected the lives of millions. It is the reason every airport in the West is an armed camp and every land is on constant alert.
Ground Zero is the site of the most lethal attack of that worldwide movement, which consists entirely of Muslims, acts in the name of Islam and is deeply embedded within the Islamic world. These are regrettable facts, but facts they are. And that is why putting up a monument to Islam in this place is not just insensitive but provocative.
Just as the people of Japan today would not think of planting their flag at Pearl Harbor, despite the fact that no Japanese under the age of 85 has any possible responsibility for that infamy, representatives of contemporary Islam -- the overwhelming majority of whose adherents are equally innocent of the infamy committed on 9/11 in their name -- should exercise comparable respect for what even Obama calls hallowed ground and take up the governor's offer.
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| | Sujet: 2580 - Dems retreat on health care cost pitch 20/8/2010, 22:43 | |
| C'est sur qu'avec les augmentations des primes d'assurance sur les quatre annees a venir (deja environ 25% cette annee) , les Americains vont tout-a-coup se mettre a adorer son engeance... Meme si on arrive a faire abroger cette inepsie, il y a peu de chances pour que les primes redescendent comme ca, c'est tout bon pour les assurances! Dems retreat on health care cost pitchBy BEN SMITH | 8/19/10 4:55 PM EDT Updated: 8/20/10 3:31 PM EDT Key White House allies are dramatically shifting their attempts to defend health care legislation, abandoning claims that it will reduce costs and the deficit and instead stressing a promise to "improve it."  - Spoiler:
The messaging shift was circulated this afternoon on a conference call and PowerPoint presentation organized by FamiliesUSA — one of the central groups in the push for the initial legislation. The call was led by a staffer for the Herndon Alliance, which includes leading labor groups and other health care allies. It was based on polling from three top Democratic pollsters, John Anzalone, Celinda Lake and Stan Greenberg.
The confidential presentation, available in full here and provided to POLITICO by a source on the call, suggests that Democrats are acknowledging the failure of their predictions that the health care legislation would grow more popular after its passage, as its benefits became clear and rhetoric cooled. Instead, the presentation is designed to win over a skeptical public and to defend the legislation — in particular, the individual mandate — from a push for repeal.
The presentation concedes that groups typically supportive of Democratic causes — people under 40, non-college-educated women and Hispanic voters — have not been won over by the plan. Indeed, it stresses repeatedly, many are unaware that the legislation has passed, an astonishing shortcoming in the White House's all-out communications effort.
"Straightforward ‘policy’ defenses fail to [move] voters’ opinions about the law," says one slide. "Women in particular are concerned that health care law will mean less provider availability — scarcity an issue."
The presentation also concedes that the fiscal and economic arguments that were the White House's first and most aggressive sales pitch have essentially failed.
"Many don’t believe health care reform will help the economy," says one slide.
The presentation's final page of "Don'ts" counsels against claiming "the law will reduce costs and [the] deficit."
The presentation advises, instead, sales pitches that play on personal narratives and promises to change the legislation.
"People can be moved from initial skepticism and support for repeal of the law to favorable feelings and resisting repeal," it says. "Use personal stories — coupled with clear, simple descriptions of how the law benefits people at the individual level — to convey critical benefits of reform."
The presentation also counsels against the kind of grand claims of change that accompanied the legislation's passage.
"Keep claims small and credible; don’t overpromise or ‘spin’ what the law delivers," it says, suggesting supporters say, "The law is not perfect, but it does good things and helps many people. Now we’ll work to improve it.”
The Herndon Alliance, which presented the research, is a low-profile group that coordinated liberal messaging in favor of the public option in health care. Its "partners" include health care legislation's heavyweight supporters: AARP, AFL-CIO, SEIU, Health Care for America Now, MoveOn and La Raza, among many others.
Today's presentation cites three private research projects by top Democratic pollsters: eight focus groups by Lake, Anzalone's 1,000-person national survey and an online survey of 2,000 people by Greenberg's firm.
"If we are to preserve the gains made by the law and build on this foundation, the American public must understand what the law means for them," says Herndon's website. "We must overcome fear and mistrust, and we must once again use our collective voice to connect with the public on the values we share as Americans."
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| | Sujet: 2581 - Rev. Franklin Graham: President Obama 'born a Muslim' 20/8/2010, 22:54 | |
| Rev. Franklin Graham: President Obama 'born a Muslim'By ANDY BARR | 8/20/10 11:13 AM EDT The Rev. Franklin Graham on Friday said that President Barack Obama was “born a Muslim” because the religion’s “seed” is passed from the father.- Spoiler:
Graham made the remark during an interview with CNN’s John King set to air Friday night after being asked about a new Pew poll showing that 31 percent of Republicans believe the president — a Christian — is Muslim.
Asked by King if he, too, has doubts about the president's faith, Graham said that Obama’s “problem is he was born a Muslim.”
“The seed is passed through the father,” Graham said. “He was born a Muslim. His father was a Muslim; the seed of Muslim is passed through the father like the seed of Judaism is passed through the mother. He was born a Muslim; his father gave him an Islamic name.”
Graham, the son of evangelist Billy Graham, acknowledged that Obama has said he is a Christian.
"He has renounced Islam, and he has accepted Jesus," Graham said. “That's what he has said he has done. I cannot say that he hasn't, so I just have to believe the president is what he has said.”
“But the confusion is because his father is a Muslim; he was born a Muslim. The Islamic world sees the president as one of theirs. That's why Qadhafi calls him his son. They see him as a Muslim,” he added. “But, of course, the president says he is a Christian, and we just have to accept it as that."
Alors que le POTUS, Barack Hussein Obama est un apostat, la pire des choses aux yeux d'un Musulman, il est considere par les Musulmans comme un coreligonnaire? On peut se demander pourquoi. |
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| | Sujet: 2582 - Barney Frank Comes Home to the Facts 24/8/2010, 10:27 | |
| TOUT DE MEME!!! (Il a a ce jour toujours defendu ses actions et refuse sa responsabilite principale dans la GGrise financiere/economique actuelle qui a mis le POTUS a la Maison Blanche!!!!) Sacre Barney! Mais les elections de novembre plus que toute autre chose ne seraient-elles pas responsables de cette epiphanie? Si elle est reelle et sincere, dommage qu'elle arrive si tard!  Barney Frank Comes Home to the Facts A Commentary By Lawrence Kudlow |
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| | Sujet: 2583 - 24/8/2010, 22:44 | |
| 'Ground Zero Mosque' Imam: America Killed More Innocents Than Al QaedaPublished August 24, 2010| FoxNews.comVideo The controversial imam at the center of the debate over the construction of a mosque near Ground Zero says his goal is to create coalitions across the religious divide, but during a 2005 conference in Australia, he said America may be worse than Al Qaeda.- Spoiler:
We tend to forget, in the West, that the United States has more Muslim blood on its hands than Al Qaeda has on its hands of innocent non-Muslims," said Imam Fiesal Abdul Rauf, speaking at the Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Center during a question and answer session dedicated to what sponsors say was a dialogue to improve relations between America and the Muslim world. "You may remember that the U.S.-led sanctions against Iraq led to the death of over half a million Iraqi children. This has been documented by the United Nations," said Rauf, who called himself a spokesman for Islam.But diplomats and others, including former President Bill Clinton, have said that sentiment is wrong. Saddam Hussein's regime corrupted then-U.N. sanctions and denied humanitarian aid to his own people. In a Nov. 8, 2000, interview on Pacifica Radio, Clinton said if any child is without food or medicine, then Saddam is to blame because the dictator is "lying to the world and claiming the mean, old United States is killing his children."During his Australian visit, the imam also said the Arab and Muslim world senses that the West does not care about Muslim lives and their pain and anguish is not heard. He explained that frustration and emotions can lead to terrorism, actions he condemned. "Acts like the London bombing are completely against Islamic law," Rauf said. "Suicide bombing, completely against Islamic law, 100 percent, but the facts of the matter is that people, I have discovered, are more motivated by emotion than logic. If their emotions are in one place and their logic is behind, their emotions will drive their decisions more often than not."'Raud added that having homes and lives destroyed does not justify "bombing innocent civilians" or "actions of terrorism.""But after 50 years of -- in many cases -- oppression, of U.S. support of authoritarian regimes that have violated human rights in the most heinous of ways, how else do people get attention?" Rauf asked, explaining, "I'm just providing you with the arguments that are happening intra-Islamically by those who feel the emotion of pain."The center that sponsored the discussion says the imam was presented in the interest of open debate and discussion. Rauf's office has not yet responded to a request for reaction about his earlier comment. The imam is currently on a taxpayer-funded State Department trip to the Mideast, where he is serving as a representative of the United States. 
Fox News' Eric Shawn contributed to this report
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| | Sujet: Re: Nouvelles en Langue Anglaise 25/8/2010, 02:14 | |
| Avec cette quonnerie de mosquée qui n'en est même pas une, Park 51 Community Center, c'est le général Patreus qui doit se demander comment il va faire pour convaincre les Afghans que les Américains ne sont pas en guerre contre l'Islam! Même BaBush n'était pas aussi quon que la droite américaine actuelle. Dire que ce centre est commandité par le principal partenaire financier de Murdoch dans Faux News, Murdoch c'est l'Aussie qui a décidé de conquérir les ÉU avec ses hordes de crypto-fascistes du Tea-Party, le chic prince Saoudien Alwaleed bin Talal, un copain de BaBush au fait...  Quant à l'Imam controversé, Feisal Abdul Rauf, il est tellement d'obédience incertaine qu'il est un ancien copain du POTUS précédent de seconde classe et de mauvais souvenir, l'AWOL BaBush, que le FBI a utilisé ses services à maintes reprises. Pour ceux qui savent, au lieu de croire à n'importe quelle sottise, l'Imam Raouf n'est ni de tendance Chiite ou Sunnite mais d'obédience Soufi. Un Soufi terroriste, c'est aussi aussi crédible qu'un franciscain tueur en série! Finalement, si Obama est maintenant musulman au yeux de 20% d'imbéciles américains, c'est qu'il y a en Amérique une base raciste, xénophobe, inculte, amorale et sans esprit critique au service des monstre qui ont Thatcher ou Reagan comme prophètes de leur religion. Des gens au service de la théologie de la prospérité, qui veulent le bien de tous les américains... tout leurs biens. Genre les frères Koch ? Des libertariens dont la fortune s'est crée grâce à l'appui de Staline. Pour ceux qui comprennent la langue de Shakespeare, je leur suggère quelques heures d'horreurs philosophiques:  |
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| | Sujet: Re: Nouvelles en Langue Anglaise 25/8/2010, 05:12 | |
| Aaaah, decidement, c'est bien le debut d'un retour en force... Il faut s'ennuyer dur sur son propre forum pour revenir ici apres en etre parti de la facon digne que l'on sait... Les methodes de propagande adoptees pourront etre comparees a celles de Ungern. |
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| | Sujet: 2586 - CIA sees increased threat from al-Qaeda in Yemen 25/8/2010, 05:49 | |
| On aurait pu croire qu'avec le CHANGEment, la nouvelle administration non -vomitive en opposition a la precedente " vomitive" elle, n'aurait plus m anipule l'opinion en leur brandissant les pires augures (est) aussi vieux que le monde eh ben apparemment, non!  Mais bon... elle se refuse a utiliser le terme de terrorisme, elle!!! C'est deja ca. CIA sees increased threat from al-Qaeda in YemenBy Greg MillerWashington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, August 24, 2010; 11:00 PMFor the first time since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, CIA analysts see one of al-Qaeda's offshoots - rather than the core group now based in Pakistan - as the most urgent threat to U.S. security, officials said. - Spoiler:
The sober new assessment of al-Qaeda's affiliate in Yemen has helped prompt senior Obama administration officials to call for an escalation of U.S. operations there - including a proposal to add armed CIA drones to a clandestine campaign of U.S. military strikes, the officials said.
"We are looking to draw on all of the capabilities at our disposal," said a senior Obama administration official, who described plans for "a ramp-up over a period of months."
The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters, stressed that that analysts continue to see al-Qaeda and its allies in the tribal areas of Pakistan as supremely dangerous adversaries. The officials insisted there would be no letup in their pursuit of Osama bin Laden and other senior figures thought to be hiding in Pakistan.
Indeed, officials said it was largely because al-Qaeda has been decimated by Predator strikes in Pakistan that the franchise in Yemen has emerged as a more potent threat. A CIA strike killed a group of al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen in 2002, but officials said the agency has not had that capability on the peninsula for several years.
"We see al-Qaeda as having suffered major losses, unable to replenish ranks and recover at a pace that would keep them on offense," said a senior U.S. official familiar with the CIA's assessments.
Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, as its Yemen-based group is called, is "on the upswing," the official said. "The relative concern ratios are changing. We're more concerned now about AQAP than we were before."
Al-Qaeda in Yemen is seen as more agile and aggressive, officials said. It took the group just a few months to set in motion a plot that succeeded in getting an alleged suicide bomber aboard a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day.
More important, officials cited the role of Anwar al-Aulaqi, an American-born cleric whose command of English and militant ambition have helped transform the Yemen organization into a transnational threat.
Philip Mudd, a former senior official at the CIA and the FBI, argues in a forthcoming article that the threat of a Sept. 11-style attack has been supplanted by a proliferation of plots by AQAP and other affiliates. "The sheer numbers . . . suggest that one of the plots in the United States will succeed," he writes in the latest issue of CTC Sentinel, a publication of the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y. In the future, he said, "the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region will not be the sole, or even primary, source of bombing suspects."
U.S. officials said the administration's plans to escalate operations in Yemen reflect two aims: improving U.S. intelligence in Yemen and adding new options for carrying out strikes when a target is found.
The CIA has roughly 10 times more people and resources in Pakistan than it does in Yemen. There is no plan to scale back in Pakistan, but officials said the gap is expected to shrink.
Details of the plans to expand operations in Yemen have been discussed in recent weeks among deputies on the National Security Council at the White House, officials said. According to one participant, the talks are not about whether the CIA should replace the U.S. military in its leading operational role in Yemen, but "what's the proper mix."
Although the CIA has expanded the number of case officers collecting intelligence in Yemen over the past year, officials said the agency has not deployed Predator drones or other means of carrying out lethal strikes.
Instead, attacks over the past eight months have been the result of secret military collaboration between Yemen and the United States.
U.S. Special Operations troops have helped train Yemeni forces and helped them to execute raids. A senior U.S. military official said the United States has not used armed drones in Yemen, mainly because they are more urgently needed in the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq. As a result, intermittent strikes on al-Qaeda targets have involved cruise missiles and other weapon that are less precise.
An airstrike on a suspected gathering of al-Qaeda operatives in Marib province on May 25 involved a cruise missile launched from a U.S. naval vessel. Among those killed was the deputy governor in the province, who was reportedly seeking to persuade the militants to give up their arms. The human rights group Amnesty International later said it found evidence that U.S. cluster munitions were used in the attack.
Proponents of expanding the CIA's role argue that years of flying armed drones over Pakistan have given the agency expertise in identifying targets and delivering pinpoint strikes. The agency's attacks also leave fewer telltale signs.
"You're not going to find bomb parts with USA markings on them," the senior U.S. official said. Even so, the official said, the administration is considering sending CIA drones to the Arabian Peninsula "not because they require the deniability but because they desire the capability."
A senior Yemeni official indicated that the government would not welcome CIA drones. "I don't think we will ever consider it," the official said. "The situation in Yemen is different than in Afghanistan or Pakistan. It is still under control."
Introducing a covert CIA capability might also improve the U.S. ability to carry out attacks - perhaps from a U.S. base in Djibouti - if the Yemeni government were to curtail its cooperation.
That relationship is "in as positive a place as we've been for some time," the senior administration official said. But, he added, "we always have to be in a position where we are able to protect our own interests should that be necessary."
The concern about al-Qaeda in Yemen is remarkable considering that the group was all but stamped out on the peninsula just a few years ago and is known more for near-misses than successful, spectacular attacks.
Indeed, some government intelligence analysts outside the CIA argued that it would be wrong to conclude that al-Qaeda's affiliate in Yemen has eclipsed the organization's core.
"We still do view al-Qaeda core as they view themselves," a senior U.S. counterterrorism analyst said, "which is the vanguard of the jihad, providing a lot of global direction and guidance."
Even under constant pressure from Predator attacks, al-Qaeda has proven remarkably resilient. Officials also stressed that it is surrounded by other militant groups in Pakistan that share its violent aims.
The U.S. citizen who planted a failed bomb at Times Square earlier this year, for example, said he had been trained by the Pakistani Taliban.
But concern about AQAP has risen sharply in the aftermath of the failed Christmas Day attack.
U.S. officials cited recent indications that AQAP has shared its chemical bomb-making technology with other militant organizations, including Somalia-based al-Shabab.
Because Yemen is an Arab country and the ancestral home of bin Laden, some analysts fear that it could be more difficult to dislodge al-Qaeda there than in Pakistan.
Officials acknowledged that since a military strike missed Aulaqi in December, they have had few clues on his whereabouts. Aulaqi has been linked to three plots in the United States, and his presence has further radicalized his peers.
"The other leaders of AQAP are predominantly Yemenis and Saudis, and their worldview and focus is on the peninsula," said the senior U.S. counterterrorism official. Aulaqi "brings a world view and focus that brings it back here to the U.S. homeland."
millergreg@washpost.com finnp@washpost.com
Staff writers Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
Dernière édition par Sylvette le 25/8/2010, 06:53, édité 1 fois |
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