Not many people like the messes Congress makes but everybody should see how they’re made.
This article takes a close look at the legislation just passed by Congress and signed by President Obama allowing the Secretary of Agriculture to issue executive orders that bypass regulations, safety, and science for the purpose of speeding genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and genetically engineered seeds (GE) and crops to market. The way the law is written, Secretary Tom Vilsack can lift restrictions on GMOs for a set period and, it appears, do so without hindrance from the courts.
Are genetically modified organisms (GMOs), seeds, and crops safe for human consumption? How has the scientific testing of these seeds been conducted and what are the results? Is there undue influence of the government and legislative process to fast track the delivery of GMOs to market? Who benefits from that influence, if it is present, and how are the benefits derived?
There’s a strange story out there about Syrian President Bashar Assad’s assassination and possible death. It has little merit but the sourcing is interesting. (Image)
Gateway Pundit reported: BREAKING: Assad Shot By Bodyguard – Hospitalized in Damascus – Posted by Jim Hoft on Sunday, March 24, 2013, 12:22 PM
The sourcing on this leads to a French publication, JSS. Gateway Pundit listed the link as “Translated from JSS News:”
JSS is a French online publication, JSS, cites the “Arab Media” as its source on Assad’s death. This is when the story falls apart.
Michael Collins
Great Britain’s three political parties just made a deal to provide a degree of regulation for the British press. The deal produces a Royal Charter that establishes a press regulator at arms-length from the government plus a regulation regime that the major media companies can join.
The charter is an outgrowth of the Leveson Commission established to get to the bottom of the press abuses in the phone hacking scandal that resurfaced in 2011. Thousands of crime victims, celebrities, and lower profile citizens had their phone hacked by the press and private detectives working for the Murdoch papers and other media outlets. The London Metropolitan Police (the Met) colluded with the Murdoch papers both by ignoring obvious criminal behavior and by using police resources to track and snoop on the news targets of the tabloids.
Why would a news organization join the voluntary regulatory regime if it’s voluntary? Good question. It’s not exactly voluntary. Let’s say The Mirror tabloid failed to join the regulatory organization. Any court cases brought against that paper/company would be subject to extraordinary damages compared to a media outlet that committed the very same transgression but happened to be part of the self-regulatory regime.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. George Santayana
George Bush lost the 2000 election by half a million votes. When the state of Florida wanted to recount votes, Bush operatives disrupted the disreputable Florida elections commissions that held the key to a fair count. But there was no point. Lists of felons from the Governor Bush Texas government were used to knock 50,000 legally registered voters off the Florida voting lists. Many of whom were minority voters. Turnout in Florida was very high. Without that preemptive strike, there would have been no recount necessary. Bush would have lost Florida outright. The 2000 election was stolen. (Image)
Bush got in and immediately planned an invasion of Iraq, the greatest foreign policy disaster in the history of the country. The true cost is over three trillion dollars.
Commander in chief Bush presided over a profound command failure leading up to 9/by failing to acknowledge overwhelming intelligence evidence of a plot to attack U.S. skyscrapers with airplanes. The military command was so disarrayed; the U.S. Air Force could only mount a few fighters in defense and they arrived late.
Bush took Clinton era deregulation and allowed Wall Street to set up a big casino scam that brought the economy and many of the people to their knees financially.
The next stage of the global financial collapse has now arrived.
In an announcement this weekend, the EU and the IMF have come to the rescue of Cyprus, at the request of the government, by offering Euro 10 billion in aid, in exchange for which the Cyprus government will impose a “one-off tax” on all private deposits in Cyprus banks. Depositors with Euro 100,000 or less in a bank account will be assessed a 6.75% tax, and deposits over this amount will be taxed at a rate of 9.9%
However politely this is described in press releases, this is nothing more than a confiscation of private property from people who did no wrong. The Cyprus banks prior to the 2008 financial collapse played a game similar to the Icelandic banks – offering lavish interest rates on deposits to attract hot money, and investing the money in a real estate bubble that has now collapsed and crippled the banks. Most of the money in Cyprus came from Russian business interests.
Iceland chose a different tack in dealing with its crisis. It essentially stiffed the IMF and the governments of the UK and The Netherlands, which were the source of hot money for Icelandic banks and which governments fully expected the Icelandic government to cover the losses. The Icelandic government refused, it allowed the banks to go under, it placed the losses on the the bank shareholders and bondholders, and it jailed the top bankers involved in the debacle. Iceland’s economy took a severe hit, but the pain was relatively short term and the economy has recovered nicely.
May you have incompetent, offensive enemies.
President Obama and the congressional Democrats have the luck of the Irish, truly. They’ve already won the Battle of the Fiscal Cliff due to the good judgment of the people. That judgement takes facts into consideration. The sequestration process is a blunt instrument wielded by a Frankenstein process that accounts for nothing sensible in terms of solving the main concern of the public; the seriously flawed, destructive economic cycle that is dragging us to a place nobody sensible wants to go. The PEW survey to the left shows that a majority think the economy in general (60%) and the military in particular (55%) will suffer due to this pathetic process of histrionic policy making.
That puts the wisdom of the people in line with the judgement of over 95% of leading economists surveyed recently who say that “growth is likely to be negatively affected by the automatic federal spending cuts that are scheduled to kick in Friday.” It makes sense. The economy is weak, unemployment, all those out of work seeking work, is around 22%, and many citizens are one paycheck away from their own fiscal cliff.
Here are some highly revealing polls and headlines from around the country late Wednesday, early today.
