The Daily Bell with Ron Paul on the Debt Ceiling Drama

The Daily Bell
VERBATIM POST
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The debt ceiling debate is providing plenty of opportunity for political theater in Washington. Proponents of raising the debt ceiling are throwing around the usual scare tactics and misinformation in order to intimidate opponents into accepting more debt and taxes. It is important to distinguish the truth from the propaganda.

First of all, politicians need to understand that without real change default is inevitable. In fact, default happens every day through monetary policy tricks. Every time the Federal Reserve engages in more quantitative easing and devalues the dollar, it is defaulting on the American people by eroding their purchasing power and inflating their savings away. The dollar has lost nearly 50% of its value against gold since 2008. The Fed claims inflation is 2% or less over the past few years; however economists who compile alternate data show a 9% inflation rate if calculated more traditionally. Alarmingly, the administration is talking about changing the methodology of the CPI calculation yet again to hide the damage of the government's policies. Changing the CPI will also enable the government to avoid giving seniors a COLA (cost of living adjustment) on their social security checks, and raise taxes via the hidden means of "bracket creep." This is a default. Just because it is a default on the people and not the banks and foreign holders of our debt does not mean it doesn't count.

Politicians also need to acknowledge that our debt is unsustainable. For decades our government has been spending and promising far more than it collects in taxes. But the problem is not that the people are not taxed enough. The government has managed to run up $61.6 trillion in unfunded liabilities, which works out to $528,000 per household. A tax policy that would aim to extract even half that amount of money from American families would be unimaginably draconian, and not unlike attempting to squeeze blood from a turnip. This is, unequivocally, a spending problem brought about by a dramatically inflated view of the proper role of government in a free society.

Perhaps the most abhorrent bit of chicanery has been the threat that if a deal is not reached to increase the debt by August 2nd, social security checks may not go out. In reality, the Chief Actuary of Social Security confirmed last week that current Social Security tax receipts are more than enough to cover current outlays. The only reason those checks would not go out would be if the administration decided to spend those designated funds elsewhere. It is very telling that the administration would rather frighten seniors dependent on social security checks than alarm their big banking friends, who have already received $5.3 trillion in bailouts, stimulus and quantitative easing. This instance of trying to blackmail Congress into tax increases by threatening social security demonstrates how scary it is to be completely dependent on government promises and why many young people today would jump at the chance to opt out of Social Security altogether.

We are headed for rough economic times either way, but the longer we put it off, the greater the pain will be when the system implodes. We need to stop adding more programs and entitlements to the problem. We need to stop expensive bombing campaigns against people on the other side of the globe and bring our troops home. We need to stop allowing secretive banking cartels to endlessly enslave us through monetary policy trickery. And we need to drastically rethink government's role in our lives so we can get it out of the way and get back to work.

Billionaire hedge fund manager Ray Dalio foresees a U.S. Dollar collapse by 2013

Ray Dalio, the sixty-one-year-old founder of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s biggest hedge fund, is tall and somewhat gaunt, with an expressive, lined face, gray-blue eyes, and longish gray hair that he parts on the left side. When I met him earlier this year at his office, on the outskirts of Westport, Connecticut, he was wearing an open-necked blue shirt, gray corduroy pants, and black leather boots. He looked a bit like an aging member of a British progressive-rock group. After a few pleasantries, he grabbed a thick briefing book and shepherded me into a large conference room, where his firm was holding what he described as its weekly “What’s going on in the world?” meeting.

Of the fifty or so people present, most were clean-cut men in their twenties or thirties. Dalio sat down near the front of the room. A colleague began describing how the European Central Bank had just bought some Greek bonds from investors at a discount to their face value—a move that the speaker described as a possible precursor to an over-all restructuring of Greece’s vast debts. Dalio interrupted him. He said, “Here’s where you are being imprecise,” and then explained at length what a proper debt restructuring would entail, dismissing the E.C.B.’s move as an exercise in “kicking it down the road.”

Dalio is a “macro” investor, which means that he bets mainly on economic trends, such as changes in exchange rates, inflation, and G.D.P. growth. In search of profitable opportunities, Bridgewater buys and sells more than a hundred different financial instruments around the world—from Japanese bonds to copper futures traded in London to Brazilian currency contracts—which explains why it keeps a close eye on Greece. In 2007, Dalio predicted that the housing-and-lending boom would end badly. Later that year, he warned the Bush Administration that many of the world’s largest banks were on the verge of insolvency. In 2008, a disastrous year for many of Bridgewater’s rivals, the firm’s flagship Pure Alpha fund rose in value by nine and a half per cent after accounting for fees. Last year, the Pure Alpha fund rose forty-five per cent, the highest return of any big hedge fund. This year, it is again doing very well.

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This quote is worth a separate post

"In 1929 children had hope for the future. Today they are hopeless, helpless and clueless – an entire generation that only knows drugs, gangs, rappers, government handouts, teen pregnancy – and it goes downhill from there."

-- Wayne Allyn Root, "Why the Greatest Depression of All Time Has Begun"

Medal of Honor Just for Reenlisting

Just as Southern battle flags were captured after failed assaults when blue-clad soldiers simply left the defensive wall to pick up a regimental flag amid dead men – and earn the Medal of Honor for this – simply re-enlisting could win the same.

Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
www.ncwbts150.com
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"
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Medal of Honor Just for Reenlisting:

“Medals and promotions came much more frequently [in the Northern military] than in the Confederate service – too often for many observers. When the 27th Maine’s tour of duty was about to expire just prior to the battle of Gettysburg, President Abraham Lincoln authorized the award of the Medal of Honor to each soldier who would reenlist. Three hundred agreed to remain on duty as “emergency troops,” but medals were issued in error to all 864 members of the regiment. The 27th had seen no battle before Gettysburg; its remnant played no role at Gettysburg.

Similarly, so many brevet (i.e., honorary) promotions were awarded, Augustus Meyers complained, that they “seemed to lose dignity” and became objects of ridicule. His friends in the ranks began to refer to mules as “brevet horses” and to camp followers as “brevet soldiers.” Such awards, moreover, seemed seldom to recognize battlefield bravery.”

(Embattled Courage, the Experience of Combat in the Civil War, Gerald F. Linderman, Free Press, 1987, page 163)

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Medal of Honor Just for Reenlisting

Senator Coburn's $9 Trillion Deficit Reduction Plan

Via NCRenegade

Summary of Savings (1 page)

Highlights of the Report (11 pages)

Section-by-Section Outline (index)

Full Report (621 pages)

‘TINGLES' GETS TROUNCED BY CONGRESSMAN JOE WALSH!

Via ANGRY WHITE DUDE

Allen West: Obama is a Marxist, Sad, Pathetic, Fear-Mongerer

Mongerer, yep, I made it up. Get it from my mother.:)
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Via Michael

Rothbard on Lincoln and His War

War Crimes of Lincoln, Grant and Sherman
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The LRC Blog

Thomas DiLorenzo

VERBATIM POST

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Via Bazz

Like the leftists and neocons who are Lincoln cultists, the beltway "libertarians" have taken to smearing and defaming Lincoln critics as "neo-Confederates." In doing so they support the centralized governmental leviathan and the foreign policy of military imperialism that is Lincoln's legacy. That of course is why statists of the Left and the Right idolize Dishonest Abe. I'd like to see if the beltwaytarians have the chutzpah to apply this label to the late, great Murray Rothbard, of Brooklyn, New York, who authored this scathing critique of Lincoln and his war that contained such passages as the following:

"The two just wars in American history were the American Revolution and the War for Southern Independence."

"If the Articles of Confederation could be treated as a scrap of paper, if delegation to the confederate government in the 1780s was revocable, how could the central government set up under the Constitution, less than a decade later, claim its powers were permanent and revocable? . . . [T]hat monstrous illogic is precisely the doctrine proclaimed by the North, by the Union, during the War Between the States."

"One of the central grievances of the South . . . was the tariff that Northerners imposed on Southerners . . . The tariff at one and the same time drove up prices of manufactured goods, forced Southerners and other Americans to pay more for such goods, and threatened to cut down Southern exports."

"The Republicans [in 1861] adopted the Whig program of statism and big government; protective tariffs, subsidies to big business, strong central government, large-scale public works, and cheap credit spurred by government."

"[Lincoln's] major emphasis was on Whig economic statism . . . Lincoln's major focus was on raising taxes . . ."

"In his first inaugural, Lincoln was conciliatory about maintaining slavery; what he was hard-line about toward the South was insistence on collecting all the customs tariffs in that region."

"Lincoln was a master politician, which means that he was a consummate conniver, manipulator, and liar."

"Lying to South Carolina, Abraham Lincoln managed to do what Franklin D. Roosevelt and Henry Stimson did at Pearl Harbor 80 years later — maneuvered the Southerners into firing the first shot."

"There is no heresy greater, nor political theory more pernicious, than sacralizing the secular. But this monstrous process is precisely what happened when Abraham Lincoln and his northern colleagues made a god out of the Union."

"Sherman's infamous March through Georgia was one of the great war crimes, and crimes against humanity, of the past century-and-a-half."

"[B]y targeting and butchering civilians, Lincoln and Grant and Sherman paved the way for all the genocidal horrors of the monstrous 20th century."

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Rothbard on Lincoln and His War

Look who Obama hired for cybersecurity team

An elite team of computer technicians assembled by the Obama administration to protect Pentagon networks from cyberattack shockingly includes a former Clinton official who "lost" thousands of archived emails under subpoena and who more recently left the Department of Homeland Security under an ethical cloud related to her qualifications, WND has learned.

The administration in May quietly hired Laura Callahan for a sensitive post at the U.S. Cyber Command, a newly created agency set up to harden military networks as part of an effort to prevent a "cyberspace version of Pearl Harbor."

The move raises doubts about the administration's vetting process for sensitive security positions. In 2004, Callahan was forced to resign from Homeland Security after a congressional investigation revealed she committed résumé fraud and lied about her computer credentials.

Investigators found that Callahan paid a diploma mill thousands of dollars for her bachelors, masters and doctorate degrees in computer science. She back-dated the degrees, all obtained between 2000 and 2001, to appear as if she earned them in 1993, 1995 and 2000, respectively. She landed the job of deputy DHS chief information officer in 2003.

Previously, as a White House computer supervisor, Callahan threatened computer workers to keep quiet about an embarrassing server glitch that led to the loss of thousands of archived emails covered by federal subpoenas pertaining to multiple Clinton scandals.

Former co-workers say they're shocked that Callahan passed a security background check and landed another sensitive post inside the federal government.

"She's a security risk," said a government computer specialist. "I don't know how she got clearance."

"We're fuming about it," said another federal employee. "Knowing her, I don't see how she could ever be 100-percent honest."

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GOA Action Alert

Do Your Senators Oppose UN Gun Grab?

The good news is that 30 Senators have signed onto a letter opposing any UN treaty that infringes on the Second Amendment.

The bad news is that a global small arms treaty could still pass unless more Senators come out in opposition.

Last week, a so-called UN “preparatory committee” met for the third time to work on the massive Arms Trade Treaty (ATT).

The ATT is the most comprehensive treaty of its kind and would regulate worldwide trade of weapons on everything from battleships to bullets. Few details of the treaty have been made public, but it is widely expected that the final draft will:

* Require gun owner registration
* Require ammunition “microstamping”
* Define “manufacturing” so broadly that any gun owner who adds so much as a scope or changes a stock on a firearm would be required to obtain a manufacturing license
* Include a ban on some types of semi-automatic firearms
* Include a ban .50 caliber firearms
* Demand the mandatory destruction of surplus ammo and confiscated firearms.

Of course, we know that the Obama administration supports all of these proposals and would love to get them passed into law. Obama’s negotiators at the UN have already expressed full support of the treaty and will work to include gun control provisions they haven’t been able to push through the Congress.

The deadline for a final version of a treaty is July 2012, at which time it will be sent to the various member countries for ratification.

Kansas Senator Jerry Moran (R) drafted a letter to President Obama stating that our Second Amendment rights are “not negotiable” and pledges to “oppose ratification of an Arms Trade Treaty presented to the Senate that in any way restricts the rights of law-abiding U.S. citizens to manufacture, assemble, possess, transfer or purchase firearms, ammunition, and related items.”

In the Untied States the treaty will go to the Senate, where it requires 67 votes to be ratified. Conversely, we need 34 votes to kill the ATT.

So we’re still four commitments short of defeating the treaty – and that doesn’t account for any Senators who are “playing politics” and who may end up supporting the ATT with the right amount of pressure.

And you can bet that the pressure will be on to get this treaty ratified before the 2012 elections.

So far, the following Senators have joined Sen. Moran in publicly opposing any anti-gun treaty:

Ayotte (NH)
Blunt (MO)
Boozman (AR)
Burr (NC)
Coburn (OK)
Cochran (MS)
Corker (TN)
Cornyn (TX)
Chambliss (GA)
Crapo (ID)
DeMint (SC)
Enzi (WY)
Graham (SC)
Hatch (UT)
Heller (NV)
Hoeven (ND)
Hutchison (TX)
Inhofe (OK)
Isakson (GA)
Johanns (NE)
Kyl (AR)
Paul (KY)
Roberts (KS)
Rubio (FL)
Sessions (AL)
Shelby (AL)
Thune (SD)
Vitter (LA)
Wicker (MS)

But 30 Senators is not enough. We need at least 34 to come out publicly in opposition to the ATT – and a few extra as “insurance.”

ACTION: Contact your Senators and urge them to cosign the Moran letter opposing any UN treaty that infringes on our Second Amendment rights. The pre-written letter thanks those who have already signed, and urges other to do so right away. So please send the letter even if one or both of your Senators already signed on.

And if you are not already a member of GOA, please consider contributing today to help us continue the fight against UN-imposed gun control.

Click Here to send your Senators a prewritten message.

Jose de la Isla: The 'Fast and Furious' gun fiasco: Deadly, deliberately crazy.

Via Sipsey Street Irregulars

Mexico's presidential election, coming up a year from now, could easily have the U.S. gun policy known as "Fast and Furious" at the center of public debate.

Revelations about how the policy was implemented and its consequences are still developing, but the bullhorn of new disclosures tends to show it was crazy from the start.

"Fast and Furious," as it now seems, was one phase of a plan managed out of Phoenix involving arms purchases destined for Mexican drug cartel members. The buys were known to U.S. government officials who were attempting to identify higher-ups in the cartels. More than 2,000 guns were sold, including those linked to the ambush killings of U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jaime Zapata.

ABC News reported in early July that Fast and Furious weapons were used in several crimes committed in Arizona.

But the "higher-ups," who authorities were attempting to identify through the operation, were already known to other investigative agencies and may even have been paid informants. Kenneth Melson, acting director of the federal agency Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said the others included the FBI and Drug Enforcement Agency, which kept his agency in the dark and he would not be the fall guy now that disclosures show what a deadly fiasco they were all engaged in. Had he known, Melson claimed, the ATF could have had a material impact on the Fast and Furious investigation as far back as late 2009 or early 2010.

The arms were allowed to slip by AFT agents into presumed organized-crime hands. One disgruntled agent was said to have reported that only 20 arms traffickers were detected during 14 months of the operation and no cartel was dismantled because of it.

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Congressman, grandson fight off armed intruder

After hearing his daughter's screams, the congressman "entered the walkway of their house and immediately went for the guy's gun and was wrestling with him. They were both on the ground, "Boswell's chief of staff Grant Woodard told local news station KCCI.

While the two scuffled, Boswell's grandson Mitchell grabbed a loaded .12-gauge shotgun from a nearby room and confronted the intruder, who then fled into the surrounding field and reportedly was still on the run.

UPDATE

Deputy Attorney General James Cole Involved in 'Fast & Furious' Whistleblower Cover-up?

Via Sipsey Street Irregulars

Operation Fast and Furious (F&F) – a program run by the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) that allowed thousands of lethal weapons to cross the Mexican border – was apparently no secret among high-level political authorities at the Department of Justice (DOJ). Among those in the know? Newly-confirmed Deputy Attorney General James Cole.

Information is now seeping out about the political whiplash that secured a confirmation vote for Cole in exchange for the DOJ’s release of documents to Congress. In a supremely ironic twist, the documents ransomed by Cole’s confirmation strongly suggest that Cole himself was involved in the cover-up of F&F.

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Wynn CEO Goes On Epic Anti-Obama Rant On Company Conference Call

Via WhatBUbbaKnows

Image: AP

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I believe in Las Vegas. I think its best days are ahead of it. But I'm afraid to do anything in the current political environment in the United States. You watch television and see what's going on on this debt ceiling issue. And what I consider to be a total lack of leadership from the President and nothing's going to get fixed until the President himself steps up and wrangles both parties in Congress. But everybody is so political, so focused on holding their job for the next year that the discussion in Washington is nauseating.

And I'm saying it bluntly, that this administration is the greatest wet blanket to business, and progress and job creation in my lifetime. And I can prove it and I could spend the next 3 hours giving you examples of all of us in this market place that are frightened to death about all the new regulations, our healthcare costs escalate, regulations coming from left and right. A President that seems, that keeps using that word redistribution. Well, my customers and the companies that provide the vitality for the hospitality and restaurant industry, in the United States of America, they are frightened of this administration.And it makes you slow down and not invest your money. Everybody complains about how much money is on the side in America.

You bet and until we change the tempo and the conversation from Washington, it's not going to change. And those of us who have business opportunities and the capital to do it are going to sit in fear of the President. And a lot of people don't want to say that. They'll say, God, don't be attacking Obama. Well, this is Obama's deal and it's Obama that's responsible for this fear in America.

The guy keeps making speeches about redistribution and maybe we ought to do something to businesses that don't invest, their holding too much money. We haven't heard that kind of talk except from pure socialists. Everybody's afraid of the government and there's no need soft peddling it, it's the truth. It is the truth. And that's true of Democratic businessman and Republican businessman, and I am a Democratic businessman and I support Harry Reid. I support Democrats and Republicans. And I'm telling you that the business community in this company is frightened to death of the weird political philosophy of the President of the United States. And until he's gone, everybody's going to be sitting on their thumbs.

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National Police Misconduct NewsFeed Daily Recap 07-18-11

Injustice Everywhere

VERBATIM POST
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Here are the 13 reports of police misconduct tracked in our National Police Misconduct News Feed for this Monday, July 18, 2011:

• Tacoma WA police are the subject of a legal claim, the precursor to a lawsuit in this state, filed by a man who was wanted for vehicular assault and for shooting his girlfriend but was unarmed when shot 5x by a police sergeant who mistook the man’s wallet for a gun [3] http://bit.ly/pYQCfs

• Chicago IL police version of a fatal officer-involved shooting incident is being investigated after it was contradicted by multiple witnesses [3] http://bit.ly/nmgnVK

• New York NY settles suit for $125k to a diabetic woman who was denied treatment for 3hrs and had to be hospitalized after a minor misdemeanor marijuana possession arrest [0] http://nyti.ms/riOUau

• Lubbock TX cop is accused of unnecessarily shooting a family’s dog to death while responding to their call for help during a home invasion [1] http://bit.ly/rf1NGk

• West Valley UT cop may face charges after a DA’s investigation ruled that it was an unjustified use of force when he fired shots at a fleeing motorist. [0] http://bit.ly/nroRNO

• Port Barre LA cop has been arrested on computer-aided solicitation of a juvenile charges on allegations that he texted a 14yr-old girl he found on Facebook nude photos of himself. [0] http://bit.ly/rcEpGu

• Lakewood WA cop resigns after an investigation finds he lied when he claimed he crashed his police cruiser because someone pointed a shotgun at him. [0] http://bit.ly/qSYCHH

• Williamsport PA drug task force cop takes a plea deal for selling seized items and agrees to testify against other cop in the same case [0] http://bit.ly/nw4whb

• Memphis TN cop charged with agg assault in a possible racially-motivated road rage case had been disciplined previously for a racial slur in 2010 [0] http://bit.ly/ruc7lN

• Bartow County GA deputy arrested on agg assault, child cruelty, threatening someone with a gun & other charges involving an alleged domestic dispute [0] http://bit.ly/pFa9S6

• Dillon SC cop arrested on grand larceny charge for allegedly stealing a pickup truck, officials say he no longer works there but won’t say whether he quit or was fired [2] http://bit.ly/ok1K9V

• Philadelphia PA cop arrested on drunk driving charges after appearing impaired at the scene of off-duty accident [0] http://bit.ly/n6U2on

• Wisconsin Dells WI cop arrested on drunk driving charges after pulled over for speeding while off duty [0] http://bit.ly/q1Lt0N

That’s it for today, stay safe out there!

MACV-SOG and the HUMINT and SIGINT Conflict

My Friend, NAGO And Drew Dix, CMOH Winner

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How analysts in offices ignored intelligence on the ground in Vietnam

More startling from the document was how much earlier the smuggling and troops insertions into South Vietnam began. Many think the major build-ups on both sides only started in 1965 when US Marines came enforce into South Vietnam. According to the NSA document, troop movements from the north were in full swing by 1959, with groups made up of communist South Vietnamese who had moved north during formation of North and South Vietnam, infiltrating down to create insurrection in the South. It reveals how the Viet Cong force was not a local insurgency but a Hanoi-inspired and directed front, initially consisting of NVA regulars of South Vietnam origin.

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Ron Paul, Time Magazine, and Lies

Via Wes

The Good Times Are Killing Me

good morning Brock,

I am here in illannoy, just finished warching a 1975 documentary, called "The Good Times Are Killin' Me" It takes place in 2 small towns in West Lousiana. one of them Basaile, I have been there ,in fact played music with some coonass', Indians. and cajuns, well hell ,they are really all cajun. Anyway, I sent this along because it is a honest look at some of the best people on this earth, some great music, and a look at a Southern lifestyle that was dying in '75, and for the most part is gone now. Simpler times, that should have never changed.......I don't think I am the only one that would enjoy seeing it, that's why I passed it along. For the Culture, and it don't get any more real... hope ya can find 58 minutes to give it a view.......

Have a great day T

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Documentary about the rapidly fading Cajun culture in rural Louisiana. About half of the tape focuses on Nathan Abshire, "Mr. Accordion," who performs traditional music with his band and talks about the old life. The other major focus of the tape is the celebration of Cajun Mardi Gras.

HERE.

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Cajun Legend Nathan Abshire 1975