SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) — The “Dr. Boom” scenario: America is about to “unleash a spending spree. Years of self-denial give way to pent-up demand,” predicts UBS economist Maury Harris in USA Today’s bold lead story.
His clue? Consumer sentiment: “Harris estimates that in the next five years, catch-up consumption will boost annual consumer spending growth by a half point to above 3% from about 2%.”
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Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve.
Reassuring? No, wishful thinking. Be very skeptical. As Robert Kuttner, author of the new “Debtors’ Prison: The Politics of Austerity Versus Prosperity” once wrote in BusinessWeek, “What do you call an economist with a prediction? Wrong.”
Harris is bucking the headwinds of history. As Jeremy Grantham, chief strategist of the $100 billion GMO money managers, recently told InvestmentNews, the newspaper of record for America’s 90,000 professional investment advisers, “3% annual GDP growth is history.”
Here’s why you better be preparing today for a crash dead ahead. As Pimco’s Bill Gross warned in his recent newsletter: “You’re going to lose money investing … because the central banks say so.” That’s right, this is a Fed-driven rally. Soon the Fed will be forced to stop printing cheap money.
No spending spree; Obama’s new Fed Chair has to raise rates
Here’s the alternative “Dr. Doom’s August scenario:” Aging bull market. Fifth year. Markets at risk. Down soon. August. Will Obama reappoint Bernanke again? No way. But who? New blood? Shake things up with Wall Street mastermind Mayor Michael Bloomberg? After more than two decades of Greenspan/Bernanke’s misguided, destructive monetary policies, America could use a guy like him at this crucial turning point.
Bloomberg
Janet Yellen, vice chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve.
But expect a safe bet. Obama favors a woman. The high rollers are already betting on Janet Yellen, vice chairman of the Fed, long-time monetary insider. Former San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank CEO. Also chairman of Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers.
But watch out, even a sure bet can misjudge hidden dangers lurking ahead of a Titanic like the $15 trillion U.S. economy. As the Wall Street Journal’s Matt Wirz wrote in March:
The Fed “won’t be able to keep a lid on interest rates forever.” So “large money managers such as BlackRock, TCW Group and Pimco are getting ready for the day when rates take their first turn higher. It isn’t coming anytime soon, these investors say. But when it does, they worry, the ascent will be swift and steep.”
Get defensive now, start preparing for a crash … later is too late
Get it? Rates will go up. Way up. Very fast. And America’s 95 million Main Street investors will be unprepared. Markets will crash. Like 1994’s 24% bond crash after Fed rate increases, notes Wirz.
The big players say the crash “won’t happen soon.” Don’t believe them. They’re betting with trillions. And they are hedging their bets, already preparing for “when rates take their first turn higher,” because rates will soar “swift and steep,” and when that happens it will be too late to prepare.
“Dr. Doom,” the economist Nouriel Roubini is also hedging his bet, misleading investors, telling us to expect a “huge rally in risky assets” the next couple years “setting markets up for a major sell-off.”
Warning, a crash is more likely to happen in August 2013 than in 2015 when the next presidential election campaign is kicking into high gear. So start preparing for a crash when the new Fed chairman ends cheap money.
Why target August for rate increases … and a crash?
Why an August trigger? Here’s the logic: Obama reappointed Bernanke in August 2009. He’s predictable. August is quiet. Earnings season over. Congress on vacation, not that they haven’t been on vacation for a while. Wall Street will be sunning on Fire Island and Nantucket.
So August is a good time to sneak in an appointment. True, Bush first appointed Bernanke in October back in 2005, but that was a different time zone.
More important than the timing is what happens after Obama broadcasts his choice of a new Fed chairman. We got a big clue: A couple years ago the New York Times noted that Yellen had a major role at the Fed to provide “forward guidance” about monetary policy, several years ahead, while “persuading investors that it is safe to accept lower interest rates.”
Yet when asked, Yellen was clear: “When the time has come, am I going to support raising interest rates? You bet.” Well, the times are a-coming.
After years of GOP Fed chairmen, new chairman will be forced to raise rates
So what’s even more predictable, after a Yellen announcement pundits will flood the news media with dire predictions of rate increases dampening the economic recovery. Why? For one thing, everyone knows they can’t stay at rock-bottom, dirt-cheap, give-away prices that help banks but are killing the rest of America.
As hedge fund manager Daniel Arbess put it succinctly in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed piece: “Monetary impotence plus fiscal paralysis equals an inadequate recovery … Stock markets have recovered all of the $10 trillion lost in the recession, but homeowners are still $5 trillion underwater.”
Arbess cites “the Pew Research Center, the highest-earning 7% of the population saw their net worth grow by 28% between 2009 and 2011, while overall the net worth of the remaining 93% of Americans dropped by 4%.” The Super Rich won big. Main Street suffered most.
More proof? In another Journal op-ed, Martin Feldstein, former chairman of Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisor, said Bernanke’s QE policies are a “dead end … the program has done little to raise economic growth while saddling the Fed with an enormous balance sheet.”
So Bernanke knows rates must rise “swift and steep.” But most likely he’s hoping America’s weak recovery will hang on till his term ends, preserving his legacy till he gets an $11 million book deal, topping Greenspan.
Three endings: Short bull ends, Bernanke ends, 30-year bond bull ends
In March 2009 my column headline read: “6 reasons I’m calling a bottom and a new bull.” The Dow crashed from 14,164. Hit rock bottom at 6,547. Wall Street lost over $10 trillion of America’s retirement money. Your money. And the stock market did recover more than 100% since. But now the long-term trend’s reversing: Now I’m calling a top to this Fed-driven bull.
So America’s facing three historical endings: The bull that started March 2009, the Fed’s cheap-money policies and the 30-year bull market in bonds.
And Pimco’s Bill Gross also agrees with Grantham’s long-term macro prediction over on InvestmentNews: “Bond investors should be expecting 2% to 3% returns over the future years … lower than expected, but … still better than cash and will provide positive returns.” Moreover, “a big spike in interest rates … wouldn’t be friendly for stocks, either.” Yes, big drop for both.
Yes, 3% annual GDP growth is gone forever. Are you prepared?
Grantham warns that from the late 1900s until the early 1980s “the trend for U.S. GDP growth was up … remarkable … 3.4% a year for a full hundred years,” powering the American Dream. But after 1980, under Reaganomics and the new conservative capitalism, “the trend began to slip,” warns Grantham.
Yes, after a century of high-growth prosperity, our GDP growth dropped “by over 1.5% from its peak in the 1960s and nearly 1% from the average of the last 30 years.”
And looking ahead at long-term macro-trends: “The U.S. GDP growth rate that we have become accustomed to for over a hundred years” is “not going back to the glory days of the U.S. GDP growth,” no matter how much wishful thinking the media quotes from in-house economists at UBS and Wall Street banks, “it is gone forever.”
Bottom line: America is deep in denial. And it’s killing our GDP. A new blinding “irrational enthusiasm” times 10. We are again in denial about our accelerating GDP decline. Grantham put it this way: “Most business people (and the Fed) assume that economic growth will recover to its old rates,” as do bank economists like UBS’s Harris.
But looking ahead to 2050, Grantham warns: “GDP growth (conventionally measured) for the U.S. is likely to be about only 1.4% a year, and adjusted growth about 0.9%.” Get it? The American economy is on a long-term decline.
But as InvestmentNews warned in their earlier in its “Special Report: Tick, Tick … Boom!” millions of investors have “no idea what’s about to happen to them.” We’re in denial, clueless and as Gross puts it, “You’re going to lose.”
MOUNT VERNON, Wash. — The Interstate 5 bridge over the Skagit River collapsed Thursday evening, injuring an unknown number of people.
Both the northbound and southbound portions of the bridge dropped into the river sometime before 7 p.m., according to Washington State Patrol trooper Mark Francis.
Francis said several cars were on the bridge when it collapsed, and many are now in the water.
It’s unclear how many people were injured or killed in the collapse.
This is a developing story that will be updated when more information is available.
Basics such as X-rays will not be covered under many employers’ minimal-coverage healthcare plans.
Some companies are avoiding Obamacare penalties by offering “skinny” insurance plans that provide employees with minimum coverage such as preventive care but little else, including benefits to help cover hospitals stays.
Minimum coverage qualifies as acceptable under the new healthcare-reform law, so benefit advisers and insurance brokers are pitching minimum plans nationally, reports the Wall Street Journal.
Employers are recognizing they can avoid a $2,000-per-worker penalty by providing such policies, even though the plans often don’t cover basics such as surgery, X-rays, or prenatal care, let alone hospitalization.
The employers still could face penalties, but they expect them to be less than the the $2,000 per worker for opting out of Obamacare. As a result, the Journal reported, more companies are seeking minimum-coverage plans and creating what amounts to a new industry of basic-insurance brokers and benefit administrators pushing the plans to clients.
Some low-benefit plans will cost employers as little as $40 to $100 per employee monthly, the Journal noted.
“For certain organizations, it may be an ideal solution to minimize the cost of opting out,” David Ellis, chief executive of Youngtown, Ariz.-based LifeStream Complete Senior Living, told the Journal.
Ellis said his firm, which employs about 350 people, may consider the low-benefit plan in order to comply with the law.
Department of Health and Human Services officials say they have seen little evidence of companies switching to the skinny plans, and that most employers are choosing to provide better benefits.
In addition, the limited plans may not appeal to all workers – and could backfire on employers.
While they would avoid the $2,000 fine, they still could be fined $3,000 for each employee who chooses not to take the company coverage and buys insurance through a state healthcare exchange.
Dustin Reininger was moving from Texas to Maine, a drive that would take several days. But because he was transporting guns in his vehicle and made the fateful decision to stop in New Jersey for a catnap, he is not facing 3-5 years in prison.
He was arrested 4 years ago and will remain in prison after an appeals court upheld his conviction on Monday, according to Stamford Advocate.
As you can imagine, Dustin was exhausted from the long drive from Texas, and he decided to stop for a quick nap before continuing his trek to his new home in Maine. Police approached the vehicle and noticed some gun cases in the back of the car.
Reininger had his whole personal gun collection with him (which is quite normal in Texas) which included 14 rifles, 4 shotguns, and 3 handguns. But he also had some hollow point ammunition. And of course hollow points are inherently evil in the state of NJ.
Upon being woken up and having his vehicle searched, Reininger was arrested, convicted and sentenced to 5 years in prison, with a chance for parole after 3.
The main problem the state of New Jersey had with Reininger was that his guns were not completely locked up, even though they were in cases. If he had a New Jersey firearms ID card he would have been completely legal as well, but since he did not live there or plan to live there, of course he didn’t have one of those.
Reininger had no plans of living in New Jersey or even spending much time in the state at all. I guess it’s not even safe to stop for a pit stop in the Garden State, even if they do pump the gas for you.
Reininger’s attorney is not happy with the way in which the police searched the vehicle and also that the juror’s in the case were not told about the law that allowed for gun transportation from one state to another, even if it involved going through states with more ridiculous gun laws. The law does state the guns must be locked and inaccessible, but a 3-5 year prison sentence for this oversight seems a bit petty.
After losing his appeal case, Reininger’s only hope is to go before the New Jersey Supreme Court, which of course would love to take time to hear a case like this right?
His attorney made this comment, and his points are very sound:
“All the officers saw were cases. The court is essentially saying the plain view of a gun case is a basis for a warrantless search. That means every law-abiding gun owner in New Jersey is subject to warrantless search if they transport their firearms in a gun case.”
“My recommendation to all gun owners is to transport all firearms in guitar cases,”
“If he’d had [a firearms owner ID card], he wouldn’t have been guilty of this offense. He didn’t have one because he didn’t live here. He was in transit and all the guns were lawfully his. So you have a situation where he is, in effect, turned into a criminal by New Jersey’s gun laws”
New Jersey already has given gun owners plenty of reasons not to live there, but now it seems they don’t even want us driving through their state. What do you think about this case? Leave a comment below to let us know.
Looks like we might have to make a separate category for all the stupid things NJ does to show their disdain for the 2nd amendment.
Serious events are about to hit the US this expert says. And he says there are 37 things you should be stocking up right now before it’s too late. Read more here.
As we relax after the failure of the gun-grabbing bill in the Senate, America’s enemies are attacking our fundamental freedom by more deviant means — with help from their fellow authoritarian socialists at the United Nations. Comrade Obama will sign the UN’s “Small Arms Treaty” early next month. Forbes has listed a few things this treaty would do to Americans:
1. Enact tougher licensing requirements, creating additional bureaucratic red tape for legal firearms ownership.
2. Confiscate and destroy all “unauthorized” civilian firearms (exempting those owned by our government of course).
3. Ban the trade, sale and private ownership of all semi-automatic weapons (any that have magazines even though they still operate in the same one trigger pull – one single “bang” manner as revolvers, a simple fact the ant-gun media never seem to grasp).
4. Create an international gun registry, clearly setting the stage for full-scale gun confiscation.
5. In short, overriding our national sovereignty, and in the process, providing license for the federal government to assert preemptive powers over state regulatory powers guaranteed by the Tenth Amendment in addition to our Second Amendment rights.
Aligning himself with a hostile power against the USA by signing this clearly unconstitutional treaty would dwarf the many other scandals for which Obama should be removed from office.
LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) — Is the highest-paid mayor in the United States broke?
With just over a month left in his second and final term, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa will leave office in June reportedly without a place to live or a car of his own to drive, according to a report published Thursday.
Jill Stewart, L.A. Weekly’s managing editor, told KNX 1070 NEWSRADIO that Villaraigosa faces an uncertain political – and financial – future when he steps down June 30.
In order to maintain his current lifestyle, which includes frequent cross-country travel, a mayoral mansion at the taxpayer-supported Getty House, an Los Angeles Police Department security detail for his personal SUV, courtside seats to Lakers games, and several other perks, associates estimate Villaraigosa’s next gig would need to pay about $750,000 a year, according to Stewart.
“His friends are so concerned because he’s lived so flamboyantly and spent basically so much of other people’s money on a very, very costly lifestyle,” Stewart said, adding that Villaraigosa has lived “far better than Gov. Jerry Brown and far more flamboyantly than actual multi-millionaire mayor Richard Riordan.”
And now, according to Stewart, Villaraigosa is broke.
“He didn’t save any money…we got his required economic interest reports where you see all their stocks and bonds and property,” Stewart said. “Nada.”
Outside of a rental property in Moreno Valley which brings in about $600 a month, Stewart said that Villarigosa has no major assets despite having been paid over $1.6 million during his time as mayor. Public pension information for Villaraigosa was not available, L.A. Weekly reported.
KNX 1070′s Jon Baird reports the outgoing mayor greeted Mayor-Elect Eric Garcetti at the Getty House to congratulate his successor Thursday and then left before reporters could ask about his future plans.
“I wanna give Eric Garcetti the opportunity, and again, I couldn’t be prouder to welcome him and congratulate him,” Villaraigosa said.
It’s still unclear where Villaraigosa will land: while staffers have been mum on the mayor’s job search, he is reportedly considering a number of possibilities after denying in February any interest in a Cabinet position in the Obama Administration.
According to L.A. Weekly, Villaraigosa may also have to wait until 2018 to make a bid for Governor of California, with Brown expected to run for reelection in 2014.
“He is asking anyone and everyone for jobs at think tanks; he thinks he could be a resident-in-scholar at UCLA or USC; he’d like to work on Wall Street,” said Stewart. “It’s incredible, he’s throwing a really wide net out there.”
The next time President Obama holds a press conference – if he ever does such a thing again, given how annoying it will be for him – it will be fair to wonder, as you listen in, WHETHER HE HAS ANY IDEA WHAT HE’S TALKING ABOUT.
I’ll check with one of the interns and get back to you. Photo by Keith Koffler
Think about it. The IRS was probing conservatives. A report was coming out, and it seems like everyone in the White House knew about it – the Counsel, the chief of staff, a deputy chief of staff and other aides the White House won’t tell us about. Except the president didn’t know.
So perhaps a reporter will try asking him if the administration is sending heavy arms Syrian rebels. Maybe someone is doing it but doesn’t want him to know so he can credibly deny it to other world leaders. Or let’s say someone asks about any of the scandals. It’s reasonable at this point to assume that he’s not the right person to query since someone may be PROTECTING him.
The White House claim that the witholding from the president of information on the report was done by a bunch of White House boy scouts to avoid any kind of perception of meddling in an inspector general investigation doesn’t make much sense. The White House already knew. If there was going to be meddling, it would far more likely have been done by staff than the president. This was purely an operation to protect the president’s political backside.
Obama’s getting slammed for not knowing what’s going on in his administration. But it seems he doesn’t even know what’s going on in his own chief of staff’s office.
Maybe Valerie Jarrett should do the next press conferences instead. Or if Obama does it, the staff should at least make sure he reads the papers first so he knows what’s going on.
If there are any up and coming bands in need of a lead guitarist, take a look at this 14-year-old girl. We’re not being sarcastic or being overly complimentary. This girl’s guitar skills are unreal.
In a video uploaded on YouTube Monday, 14-year-old Tina shows off her ridiculously amazing guitar chops with her flawless rendition of the solo from Van Halen’s “Eruption.”
The clip is only about a minute and a half, but it only takes about 15 seconds to see that Tina is the real deal. Her video currently has more than 300,000 views in just a few days.
Watch below:
As the Yahoo! blog “The Sideshow” points out, Tina has been uploading videos of herself playing guitar for years. And she was still awesome when she was 11 in 2008. Watch that clip here:
Jim Hoft’s Gateway Pundit reports Janey “Billion Round” Napolitano’s armed DHS thugs met unarmed and non-violent TEA Party protestors at several IRS offices; including the Saint Louis and Los Angeles offices yesterday.
Unlike Napolitano’s Democratic Partei; the Taxed Enough Already Party is notoriously non-violent. A million and a half protesters gathered on the Mall in Washington, without incident, and left the grounds far cleaner than they found them. Despite that fact, and the tacit approval Napolitano gave the violent “Occupy protesters,” Napolitano’s Gropers even sent a chopper to intimidate law abiding citizens exercising their First Amendment right to peacefully assemble in pursuit of redress of grievances.
It is time for the Gropers to be defunded. We cannot afford a show of security instead of actual security, and DHS’ enormous stocks of ammunition would be far better in civilian hands.
Proper Grip: Guidelines & Techniques for Recoil Control
Of the fundamentals of shooting, the Stance and Grip are the most important for reducing felt recoil. Once you have decided on your solid stance, your grip is the next important key to master for controlling recoil. Individuals usually hold a firearm the way they pick it up, without much thought to how much their grip impacts the way they shoot. An improper physical grip and mental mindset almost always lead to not handling recoil well and poor target hits. Likewise, a proper grip will help absorb recoil, provide control and stability for getting more accurate shots, provide protection and safety from slide “bite” when the action moves the slide, and prevent malfunctions and stoppages. If your thumbs are in the way, there is a possibility of the slide hitting them and malfunctions. If you exert even minimal pressure on the slide-lock lever with your Support thumb, it can fail to lockback the slide when empty and cause failure to go into battery and mechanical stoppages. Also, a too-loose grip (limp wristing) can cause failure to feed and failure to eject and other operating mechanical problems. You must recognize that learning a proper grip may feel very uncomfortable and unnatural at first, especially if you have not learned, nor practiced regularly with it, or have been shooting with an improper grip for some time. Also, this instinctive and improper grip might be unsafe, especially on a semi-automatic pistol. So, it is best to learn what is the proper grip for yourself and practice with it for a while to give it a chance for success, even it feels unnatural and uncomfortable at first. Decide on a Grip and be CONSISTENT with using it.
Instructors usually say that handling recoil is 80% mental and 20% physical, so think positive mentally and get over the anticipation of the “Kick” and sound of the “Bang” to allow your physical body to work naturally with the recoil. Without a doubt, one of the biggest challenges for new (and many) shooters is handling recoil. Ideally you want felt recoil going straight back from your wrist into the radius bone of your forearm, with a locked Strong wrist. New shooters who don’t have the depth of experience and practice, haven’t yet allowed their minds to accept that a big, loud bang isn’t going to hurt. Shooters need to learn to accept the noise and through practice with the proper grip, ignore it. So, how do you decide the proper grip to control recoil. Interestingly, it is the same procedure you use to decide if any gun is the correct fit and the right one for you personally to select. Recognize that not all firearms fit everyone’s hand the same. A 1911-style handgun, for example, has a thin grip thanks to its single-stack magazine. Likewise, a Glock 21 has a really thick grip due to the .45 ACP double-stack magazine. So, buy and use a firearm that fits your hand and fingers properly and functions well, not because your friend likes it or because it looks good. If it fits YOUR hand properly and you grip it correctly, then you can better handle the recoil. Whether the firearm is a revolver or a semi-auto pistol affects your type of grip. Revolvers usually don’t permit your hand to get very high on the frame of the gun, so when you grip a revolver make certain that your strong-hand wraps around the grip tightly and as high up on the grip as is comfortable. Pistols usually have a beavertail or backstrap that can be easily gripped up high.
Straight Alignment of Wrist and Arm
There should be straight alignment of your grip from your locked strong-hand wrist back to the radius of your strong arm. The strong hand with the gun should NOT be offset or canted to the left or right of the strong arm, but rather directly inline with the strong arm. Straight alignment of the grip allows for better control of movement and recoil for better accuracy.
One of the mainstream media journalists whose pursuit of the truth has been truly tenacious and nonpartisan is CBS News’ Sharyl Attkisson. Her tough reporting has made life difficult for everyone from Hillary Clinton to the Bush administration and Congressional Republicans. She’s also been relentless on the Obama administration’s Fast & Furious gun-running scandal — and, of course, Benghazi. As we mentioned this week, Attkisson’s tough investigative journalism is starting to bother unnamed CBS News executives. Here’s Politico’s scoop, in case you missed it:
But from where Attkisson is sitting, there are actually two Goliaths, one of which is almost entirely absent from the Post profile. The second Goliath is CBS News, which has grown increasingly frustrated with Attkisson’s Benghazi campaign. CBS News executives see Attkisson wading dangerously close to advocacy on the issue, network sources have told POLITICO. Attkisson can’t get some of her stories on the air, and is thus left feeling marginalized and underutilized. That, in part, is why Attkisson is in talks to leave CBS ahead of contract, as POLITICO reported in April. Farhi mentions “internal conflicts” in the final paragraph, though he seems to dismiss them. The “internal conflicts” are indeed real — Attkisson is still eyeing an exit, according to sources — and provide important context for today’s piece.
My analysis of this report was highly critical of CBS News. The network appears to be penalizing one of its best correspondents because she’s doing her job too aggressively. Conservatives quickly imputed a political motive to CBS News’ internal drama, but the Daily Caller has uncovered a connection that suggests there’s a striking personal angle to this controversy, as well:
The brother of a top Obama administration official is also the president of CBS News, and the network may be days away from dropping one of its top investigative reporters for covering the administration’s scandals too aggressively. CBS News executives have reportedly expressed frustration with their own reporter, Sharyl Attkisson, who has steadily covered the Obama administration’s handling of the Benghazi terrorist attack in Libya since late last year…On Friday, ABC News reported that the Benghazi talking points went through 12 revisions before they were used on the public. The White House was intimately involved in that process, ABC reported, and the talking points were scrubbed free of their original references to a terror attack. That reporting revealed that President Obama’s deputy national security advisor, Ben Rhodes — brother of CBS News president David Rhodes — was instrumental in changing the talking points in September 2012. ABC’s reporting revealed that Ben Rhodes, who has a masters in fiction from NYU, called a meeting to discuss the talking points at the White House on September 15, 2012.
Well then. “CBS News executives” are wringing their hands that Sharyl Attkisson maybe “wading dangerously close” to advocacy on Benghazi. It’s now entirely reasonable to ask if the top executive at the network may be “wading dangerously close” to a massive conflict of interest. Is David Rhodes trying to protect his brother — who’s just been revealed to be knee-deep in the Benghazi cover-up — by muzzling and marginalizing a problematic journalist within his news division? Kudos to the Caller for shining the spotlight on that relationship, but it’s amazing that no one connected those dots sooner. How many people in the elite MSM orbit are aware that Ben and David Rhodes are brothers? And they definitely are brothers, by the way; The New York Times confirmed that fact in a glowing profile of the younger Rhodes in March:
The son of a conservative-leaning Episcopalian father from Texas and a more liberal Jewish mother from New York, Mr. Rhodes grew up in a home where even sports loyalties were divided: he and his mother are ardent Mets fans; his father and his older brother, David, root for the Yankees. “No one in that house agreed on anything,” said David Rhodes, who is now the president of CBS News.
If Sharyl Attkisson continues to be relegated to the sidelines, or is even shown the door, at CBS News over her Benghazi coverage, the public must demand full disclosure about David Rhodes’ role in that decision-making process. The Rhodes brothers’ familial tie may be a bizarre, irrelevant coincidence. It’s possible. But it’s not a leap to suggest that this reeks of corruption and collusion.
UPDATE - The great Brit Hume weighs in on Twitter with an interesting piece of context:
@guypbenson Yes CBS News head @davidgrayrhodes is WH Ben Rhodes’s brother, but in his decade+ at Fox News, he was hardly thought a liberal.
So if David Rhodes is a down-the-middle guy, or even has conservative leanings, that changes the calculus a bit. If Politico is right and Attkisson is being targeted by CBS News higher-ups, there are a few possibilities worth considering, given this additional information from Hume: (1) If Attkisson is being punished for politically-motivated reasons, perhaps Rhodes isn’t involved. (2) If he is involved, Rhodes’ interests may be personal, not political. (3) Attkisson’s conduct has crossed some line of professionalism, although I’ve seen zero evidence that even hints at that conclusion. Finally, there’s option (4), wherein Politico got the story wrong, and this is all much ado about nothing. I notice that David Rhodes has just followed me on Twitter, so I will reach out to him and see if we can get to the bottom of this. As I mentioned in the original post, we don’t know what the truth is here, but questions abound.
UPDATE (May 15) - Attkisson says her bosses have been supportive of her work on Benghazi. CBS News’ shows and producers? Not so much.
Also, Kaitlyn Hunt — the lesbian charged with two counts of felony lewd and lascivious battery on a child — is a blonde who’s kinda cute, and who could object to cute blonde teenage lesbians? Here’s a local news video:
While some readers may be struggling to resist the temptation to Google “blonde + teen + lesbian,” let me remind you sick freaks that if you were to download photos or videos of what Kaitlyn Hunt is charged with doing to a 14-year-old girl, that would be a federal crime.
If the feds could send you disgusting perverts to prison for those photos, how do the enlightened minds at Think Progress manage to portray the perpetrator of these acts as a victim of bigotry?
Also, Kaitlyn’s mom (who apparently can’t spell “zealot”) says that the parents of the 14-year-old who pressed charges are “out to destroy my daughter [because] they feel like my daughter ‘made’ their daughter gay,” and these “bigoted, religious” parents “see being gay as a sin and wrong, and they blame my daughter.”
See? You deviant weirdos thought Jailbait Lesbian School Girls was just a popular DVD title, but now it’s a civil right.
“If this was an 18-year-old male and that was a 14-year-old girl, it would have been prosecuted the same way,” Indian River County Sheriff Deryl Loar said during a Monday news conference… . “The idea is to protect people in that vulnerable group from people who are older, 18 and above,” said Bruce Colton, state attorney for Florida’s 19th circuit, which includes Indian River County and other parts of the Treasure Coast. “…The statute specifically says that consent is not a defense.” Colton said … this case exemplifies the purpose of the current law and added he would not support any effort to make consensual relationships among peers legal. “There’s a big maturity difference between them,” he said. “You’re talking the difference between a senior in high school and a freshman in high school. That’s what the law is designed to protect.”
But . . . consensual! equality!
These are the only arguments offered by the “Stop the Hate” crowd at Daily Kos, evidently willing to declare open season on Florida 14-year-olds in order to be consistent in their ideology. And if you disagree with them, you’re just a hater.
Why so judgmental, Newsbusters? Don’t you understand the “emerging awareness” doctrine of theLawrence v. Texas decision? And isn’t it only logical that this “emerging awareness” would eventually include the constitutional right to bang a ninth-grader?
So if the “Stop the Hate” petitioners get their way, Florida will be overrun by a stampede of perverts following around school-girls in hopes of getting some of that “consensual” action. And they’ll call it Progress.
UPDATE: The freaks have a hashtag (#FreeKate) with some of the usual suspects, including Chris Hayes of NAMBLA MSNBC:
Republicans have corrupted the Founders’ intent. I want to make the Senate work again – that is my commitment.
Poor Harry Reid’s dream of bipartisanship is always out of reach, but he’s not giving up. If accusing the GOP of corrupting the very core of America is part of his charm offensive, it’s no wonder he’s having so much trouble solving that gridlock problem.
