Thursday, April 19, 2012

Panetta on threats of war; Employed workers getting unemployment benefits; Diversity; New cars to have black boxes; Obama's 2nd term agenda; Hillary defends capitalism

The Hill writes: Defense Secretary Leon Panetta offered a blunt assessment of the threats facing the United States on Wednesday, saying the potential for another war breaking out remains high in places like North Korea.
“We’re within an inch of war almost every day in that part of the world,” Panetta said in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, in response to a question about the threats in the Korean Peninsula. “And we just have to be very careful about what we say and what we do.” http://thehill.com/blogs/defcon-hill/policy-and-strategy/222387-panetta-were-within-an-inch-of-war-almost-every-day
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The Washington Post reports: District’s attorney general said Wednesday that he will sue former city employees who collected unemployment benefits while working.
Attorney General Irvin B. Nathan said his office will begin filing civil suits “in the next few weeks” to recover the city’s money. District officials have estimated that the city had paid as much as $800,000 in jobless benefits to working city employees since 2009.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/district-fires-workers-in-unemployment-benefits-probe/2012/04/18/gIQAxbmjPT_story.html
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Politico writes: President Barack Obama’s team is looking to hire more African-Americans, a search that has stirred a debate among black Democrats about Obama’s record on diversity and its implications for his reelection.  [It has been noted that this President, who signed an Executive Order to force more diversity in government employment, has employed almost no African Americans in his campaign.]
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Infowars writes: A bill already passed by the Senate and set to be rubber stamped by the House would make it mandatory for all new cars in the United States to be fitted with black box data recorders from 2015 onwards.
Section 31406 of Senate Bill 1813 (known as MAP-21), calls for “Mandatory Event Data Recorders” to be installed in all new automobiles and legislates for civil penalties to be imposed against individuals for failing to do so.
Although the text of legislation states that such data would remain the property of the owner of the vehicle, the government would have the power to access it in a number of circumstances, including by court order, if the owner consents to make it available, and pursuant to an investigation or inspection conducted by the Secretary of Transportation.
Given the innumerable examples of both government and industry illegally using supposedly privacy-protected information to spy on individuals, this represents the slippery slope to total Big Brother surveillance of every American’s transport habits and location data.
The legislation, which has been given the Orwellian title ‘Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act’, sailed through the Senate after being heavily promoted by Democrats Harry Reid and Barbara Boxer and is also expected to pass the Republican-controlled House. http://www.infowars.com/mandatory-big-brother-black-boxes-in-all-new-cars-from-2015/
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Investors Business Daily's editorial writes [There are 10 things listed]: Now for something really terrifying: a list of what Obama has in store for America in a second term if he can fool independents into voting for him again.
1)The president would double down on ObamaCare, running up family premiums even higher than he already has while ruining the quality of health care in America.
Kaiser Family Foundation says Obama's new health regulations are already fanning medical inflation, even before the individual mandate takes effect in 2014.
Then, tens of millions of uninsured — along with millions of covered employees — will be herded into government-subsidized insurance exchanges, creating a massive Medicaid program that will starve private insurance providers and eventually force a single-payer system run entirely by government.
Which was Obama's plan all along. 
2) He'd ration Medicare services for the elderly through the formation of a powerful new bureaucracy — the Independent Payment Advisory Board — which would make life-or-death medical decisions for millions of Americans. Whenever Medicare denies a service, private insurers almost always follow.
http://news.investors.com/article/608264/201204181800/what-obama-will-do-in-second-term.htm?p=2
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Investors.com writes:  After a weekend of cavorting in Colombia, the White House was caught flat-footed by Argentina's takeover of a big oil company whose loss will hike gas prices, harm Spain and slam U.S. investors. Lucky us.
Never was a response to a global outrage more mealy-mouthed than the one from the U.S. after Argentina's President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, standing under a portrait of Evita Peron, announced a brazen grab for YPF, the Argentine oil company that's 57% owned by Spain's Repsol.
Markets fell, world leaders denounced the violation of contracts and economically battered Spain rallied European Union support.

Then, leading from behind after Spain vowed a "forceful" response, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tried to toughen up: "Having an open market is a preferable model. Models that include competition and market access have been the most successful around the world."
Which must have provoked a horse laugh from Buenos Aires. After all, Fernandez heard President Obama the first time when he declared that he free market "doesn't work. It's never worked."  http://news.investors.com/article/608159/201204171850/obama-shows-weakness-on-argentine-takeover-of-oil-company.htm?src=SThru
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