31 March 2008
News and Comments - 03/31/08
Posted by Joy Bischoff under: What's News .
27 Comments so far...
Cameron Says:
31 March 2008 at 6:23 am.
If we know where they are, why can’t we do anything about it?
Hayden: Pakistan border poses danger
By HOPE YEN, Associated Press Writer Sun Mar 30, 2:28 PM ET
WASHINGTON - The situation in the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan where al-Qaida has established a safe haven presents a “clear and present danger” to the West, the CIA director said Sunday.
Michael Hayden cited the belief by intelligence agencies that Osama bin Laden is hiding there in arguing that the U.S. has an interest in targeting the border region. If there were another terrorist attack against Americans, Hayden said, it would most certainly originate from that region.
“It’s very clear to us that al-Qaida has been able for the past 18 months or so to establish a safe haven along the Afghan-Pakistan border area that they have not enjoyed before, and that they’re bringing in operatives into the region for training,” he said.
Hayden added that that those operatives “wouldn’t attract your attention if they were going through the customs line at Dulles (airport, outside Washington) with you when you’re coming back from overseas — who look Western.”
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080330/ap_on_go_ot/cia_director;_ylt=ApzHnb_WClbgfXKf4noPguKyFz4D
E.E. Says:
31 March 2008 at 11:09 am.
I just heard on the news a report about food stamps and how many people are now getting on them and many more will in the coming years. Then they said how those people can’t afford fresh fruits and vegetables now because they are too expensive and they mostly have to buy starchy foods. So of course we think we need to increase their food stamps so they can eat healthy even though our country is almost bankrupt with debt. Then came the shocker. They said each person on food stamps gets about a hundred dollars worth a week. And that is without having to pay tax on it. A hundred a week and they can’t buy fruits and vegetables? I don’t know a lot of people who pay that much a week for groceries. This is absurd. Things are out of balance. I’m not saying we shouldn’t help people but we are supposed to feel sorry for them getting only a hundred a week on groceries per person? I spend half that much. Give me a break.
Carrie Says:
31 March 2008 at 11:40 am.
Rush says that if McCain wins that the party will be changed for a long time. That the Rockefeller Republicans will say the Reagan Republican movement is dead. They will be sure that being a moderate Republican is the way to win elections and shows that the party needs to be moderate. This is pretty much what a lot of us think and why we think that in the long run it is better to stand up against McCain.
E.E. that really surprises me about food stamps. I am working and taking classes and I live on about twenty five dollars a week for food. What a liberal farce.
Carrie Says:
31 March 2008 at 11:42 am.
I guess I better add that Rush still doesn’t think it is best that McCain losses because things are so bad he doesn’t want the dems in power. He also is saying that things are such a mess that things are going to be bad for who ever gets in. He is hoping McCain will keep his promises but I don’t believe McCain will because he has proven himself such a liar.
Jesse Says:
31 March 2008 at 12:00 pm.
We were heading into a recession when Bush got into office and even though it was happening the last year of Clinton’s presidency, it got blamed on Bush. The same thing will happen with McCain if he gets in. The press is liberal and they will always blame it on the republican.
E.E. Says:
31 March 2008 at 12:14 pm.
Rush is talking about global warming and Al Gore’s new push to spread the religion. Rush said it is a hoax to get the citizens of the world to allow the spread of big government. It is a power grab. I’m glad Rush can see this. Newt Gingrich is on board with this too. I think Gingrich has sold out. Every time I hear him lately he sounds like the rest of the Republican Establishment who has pushed McCain on us and is more moderate than conservative. It makes me sad to watch people selling out.
SGS Says:
31 March 2008 at 12:33 pm.
EE, I once survived on 50 dollars a MONTH! Yes, it was all rice and beans, but I have enough leftover to purchase some vegetables (brocolli, especially, for my broccolli-rice dinner - yumm!). I’ll be thrilled to have $100 a week way back then, but I do not see how I can spend ever that much!
SGS Says:
31 March 2008 at 12:39 pm.
The following items are from my daily Idaho Values Alliance email — the bonus bytes. They made me mad, and I figured I should not be the only one being mad 
Sen. McCain recently met with leading fiscal and social conservatives and left them politely unenthused. His credentials with conservatives will not be helped by revelations that Sen. Joe Lieberman is the co-chair of McCain’s Connecticut campaign and that Lieberman will attend the Republican nomination convention to “be helpful in some capacity” to Sen. McCain. The two have teamed in the past to impose regulations on sales at gun shows, and to push the Senate to impose drastic, economy-destroying limits on CO2 emissions. Some conservatives fear that McCain may even tap Lieberman as his running mate.
Washington Times: Mavericks meet in the middle
What the IVA editor have left out from the article itself is that Lieberman had the choice of celebrating his 25th anniversary or going on the middle-east trip with McCain, and he chose McCain over his wife! come on, there are some anniversaries you cannot miss, and the 25th certainly is ONE!
T. Fan Says:
31 March 2008 at 12:39 pm.
It is probably the wealthy who are looking at all of this and they spend a lot on food. Most of the people running the social programs are liberals and they want equal distribution of everything, i.e. socialism. But what this creates is apathy in the person receiving the goods and they won’t see it as a temporary help until they can get on their feet. Why should they, they will do much better staying on the hand out than trying to get a job and help themselves. This stifles self determination.
SGS Says:
31 March 2008 at 12:45 pm.
From the same email as above:
Speaking of environmental insanity, the EPA issued its economic analysis of the Lieberman global warming bill that Sen. McCain is so fond of, and estimated that the bill, if enacted, will shrink the U.S. economy by $2.9 trillion by mid-century. That’s 6.9% smaller than it would be otherwise, a decline roughly matching the drastic shrinkage of the first two years of the Great Depression. A self-inflicted, government-imposed second Great Depression, enthusiastically supported by the standard bearer of the Republican Party! Small wonder conservatives remain unimpressed with Sen. McCain. Worse, this spectacularly wrong-headed bill would only reduce global temperatures by a maximum of 0.20 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.
FOXNews.com - Junk Science: The Global Warming Bubble
By the way, if you want to know the truths of the environmental issues, Junk Science is the place to go! For example, remember that alarming news from last week about how a huge ice have broken away from the main iceland in Antartic — it’s nothing out of ordinary. It will bind back. It does that all the time.
T. Fan Says:
31 March 2008 at 12:46 pm.
I am beginning to question why some of the talk show hosts are giving McCain a free pass. I know it may not seem that way because they say a few things but SGS, things like that are all over the place and not getting put under the microscope like they should. McCain comes out in speeches and says things, then if you really read everything out there, you find out that he is saying other things to other people. He isn’t consistent. He is saying whatever he has to in order to get elected but he is far more liberal than most people even know. I’m mad too.
Romney got attacked because he didn’t hunt enough but McCain, a guy so strong on defense, is attacking the second amendment? Something is very wrong with this picture. If he picks Joe then the pretense will be up.
SGS Says:
31 March 2008 at 1:33 pm.
T.Fan, I have already decided that there is only one condition that I shall vote for McCain, that is, if he picks Romney as his companion (I still do not have much of a hope for this kind of ticket, anyway). Otherwise, I will not vote Republican this year. McCain earned the nickname of Maverick not because he fought against other Republicans, but because he fought againt the conservative principles. The media tried its hardest to make you forgot why he is called thus.
T. Fan Says:
31 March 2008 at 1:37 pm.
We all got an eye full of what the media can do with what they did to Romney. No one should be ignorant about their liberal bias and power any more. So it seems to me like we should get our back up and refuse to be manipulated by them any more. I won’t let them twist me into voting for McCain unless he picks Romney. I would love it if he picked Fred Thompson but I know there isn’t a chance of that so I’m hoping he wises up and tags Mitt.
The Realist Says:
31 March 2008 at 1:41 pm.
I’ve only got two words to say about that kind of thinking:
SUPREME COURT SUPREME COURT SUPREME COURT SUPREME COURT
SGS Says:
31 March 2008 at 2:09 pm.
E.E. More on your food stamp, from today’s Idaho Values Alliance email:
The Judeo-Christian tradition teaches its followers to be self-reliant and voluntarily generous to the poor. The church of secular liberalism teaches its followers to be dependent on government handouts and requires the involuntary transfer of wealth. The sad result of the triumph of the theology of secular liberalism is that more Americans than ever (28 million) are now receiving food stamps, which will cost working Americans $36 billion in 2009, taxpayers who will now be forced to feed their own families and the families of strangers on the other side of the country as well. An astonishing one in every eight residents of Michigan is now on food welfare, while one in 10 New Yorkers and one in 12 residents of Rhode Island are also dipping into the public food trough.(Emhpasis mine)
As Jobs Vanish and Prices Rise, Food Stamp Use Nears Record - New York Times
If you do not realize it, there are now about 300 million Americans. 28 millions are on food stamp. That is an appalling 10% of Americans - almost! TEN PERCENTAGE OF US NEED HELP WITH OUR BASIC ESSENTIALS!!! That is terrible! Now I’m mad!
The Realist Says:
31 March 2008 at 2:12 pm.
Those figures scare me bad because I know it is going to get worse. How can we keep something like that up? With gas prices and health care rising not to mention food prices and everything else, this is going to break our economy. One in every eight residents of Michigan? This should be headline news.
SGS Says:
31 March 2008 at 2:22 pm.
The Realist — the sad part about all of this is that the majority of people have no clue on how to grow their own food, leaving alone preserving them. They do not have a pantry full of food. I read from somewhere else that the average American family have only 3 days worth of food in their shelves. So, no storage, no know-how, absoutely dependence on the stores and such — they are people waiting to be controlled! New Orleans and its Superdome is a perfect illustration of all of this!
Jan W. Says:
31 March 2008 at 2:22 pm.
You guys are talking about some good stuff today. I heard a guy on talk radio last night talking about the crisis in 1929 and the soup lines. He says we don’t have soup lines today, we have food stamps. The problem with that is when so many people need food stamps it makes the problem a lot worse because we are getting even more in debt. I know we have to help hungry people but it goes overboard just like yo guys are saying and doesn’t give people an incentive to find a job. Liberals think we are insensitive because we don’t want to help the poor but that isn’t true. We want to help but it has to be realistic. You can’t get blood from a turnip and some day the debt has to be paid. It comes from somewhere not just out of thin air because we want to help.
Cameron Says:
31 March 2008 at 2:53 pm.
Brace for $1 Trillion Writedown of `Yertle the Turtle’ Debt
Review by James Pressley
March 31 (Bloomberg) — Be it ever so devalued, $1 trillion is a lot of dough.
That’s roughly on a par with the Russian economy. More than double the market value of Exxon Mobil Corp. About nine times the combined wealth of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates.
Yet $1 trillion is the amount of defaults and writedowns Americans will likely witness before they emerge at the far side of the bursting credit bubble, estimates Charles R. Morris in his shrewd primer, “The Trillion Dollar Meltdown.” That calculation assumes an orderly unwinding, which he doesn’t expect.
“The sad truth,” he writes, “is that subprime is just the first big boulder in an avalanche of asset writedowns that will rattle on through much of 2008.”
Expect the landslide to cascade through high-yield bonds, commercial mortgages, leveraged loans, credit cards and — the big unknown — credit-default swaps, Morris says. The notional value for those swaps, which are meant to insure bondholders against default, covered about $45 trillion in portfolios as of mid-2007, up from some $1 trillion in 2001, he writes.
Morris can’t be dismissed as a crank. A lawyer, former banker and author of 10 other books, he knows a thing or two about the complex instruments that have spread toxic debt throughout the credit system. He once ran a company that made software for creating and analyzing securitized asset pools. Yet he writes with tight clarity and blistering pace.
AND HERE IS THE LAST PARAGRAPH OF THE ARTICLE:
What he fears is that the U.S. will instead follow the Japanese precedent, seeking to “downplay and to conceal. Continuing on that course will be a path to disaster.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aHCnscodO1s0
SGS Says:
31 March 2008 at 3:02 pm.
Jan W. A proposal for you… Do you want to bet how those soup lines back in 1930s were funded? I can bet you that they entirely were run by the non-profit and religious organizations! Not one cent of government money was used! 
SGS Says:
31 March 2008 at 3:04 pm.
Last article for the day… This from Peggy Noonan, a contributor of Wall Street Journal who used to write speeches for President Ronald Reagen. She was talking about the moods of the general public toward Hillary Clinton. She said:
What struck me as the best commentary on the Bosnia story came from a poster called GI Joe who wrote in to a news blog: “Actually Mrs. Clinton was too modest. I was there and saw it all. When Mrs. Clinton got off the plane the tarmac came under mortar and machine gun fire. I was blown off my tank and exposed to enemy fire. Mrs. Clinton without regard to her own safety dragged me to safety, jumped on the tank and opened fire, killing 50 of the enemy.” Soon a suicide bomber appeared, but Mrs. Clinton stopped the guards from opening fire. “She talked to the man in his own language and got him [to] surrender. She found that he had suffered terribly as a result of policies of George Bush. She defused the bomb vest herself.” Then she turned to his wounds. “She stopped my bleeding and saved my life. Chelsea donated the blood.”
And if you do not get it, she closed immediately afterward with:
Made me laugh. It was like the voice of the people answering back. This guy knows that what Mrs. Clinton said is sort of crazy. He seems to know her reputation for untruths. He seemed to be saying, “I get it.”
Saddened Says:
31 March 2008 at 3:10 pm.
SGS, I was thinking the same thing about the soup lines. We live in such a different world. I can’t imagine a time in history where people were less equipped to care for themselves if things go back to the basics than now. What a disaster it will be when some of the things we read about inthe book of Revelation really gets rolling.
LOL about Clinton.
E.E. Says:
31 March 2008 at 3:43 pm.
Cameron, good article…or bad actually. I agree with the “downplay and conceal” part at the end. That is how I’ve been seeing what has been going on. That’s how to make things worse in the long run instead of dealing with it now.
Hank Says:
31 March 2008 at 5:26 pm.
I have been a little confused about the ins and outs of the proposed financial regulatory system.
AFter listening to Mark Levin, I think I have things straight. Both Levin and Roy have law degrees so I am going to believe what they are saying. This is socialism.
I wrote down something Levin said that I thought was powerful. Our government has created the mess by being economically foolish but politically popular. We get to pay for this with our liberty and our treasure and we have no say.
I am afraid we are getting into a really serious problem.
Carrie Says:
31 March 2008 at 5:29 pm.
I was listening to Hank. I know he is smart and understands all this kind of stuff but I wish he wouldn’t be so rude to callers. He just hung up on this guy and called him a dumb lib. He said liberals are schizophrenic. Joy is right that we are never going to heal as a country if we can’t be more polite. I’m so glad my parents taught me to respect people.
SGS Says:
31 March 2008 at 5:33 pm.
Carrie, are you referring to Hank of the comment immediate before yours? I am trying to figure out what you are saying, especially about the calls and being rude. From your comment, you would think that the people behind this blog have their own radio
Carrie Says:
31 March 2008 at 5:36 pm.
haha, dang did that come out wrong. I always forget which word to use…to or too. I should have written too. I was listening to Mark Levin. Thanks for catching that SGS.
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