Israel Threatens Abbas: Defer UN vote on Goldstone or face ‘second Gaza’

The request by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to the United Nations Human Rights Council last year to postpone the vote on the Goldstone report followed a particularly tense meeting with the head of the Shin Bet security service, Haaretz has learned. At the October meeting in Ramallah, Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin told Abbas that if he did not ask for a deferral of the vote on the critical report on last year’s military operation, Israel would turn the West Bank into a “second Gaza.”

Diskin, who reports directly to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, threatened to revoke the easing of restrictions on movement within the West Bank that had been implemented earlier last year. He also said Israel would withdraw permission for mobile phone company Wataniya to operate in the Palestinian Authority. (Read more from haaretz.com)

Attack dogs unleashed in Ron Paul’s home district

From a mailing:

Seven candidates have filed to run against me. These candidates include three Republicans in my own primary on March 2, and they will stop at nothing to tear down and destroy all we have worked for.

Please read some of the quotes my opponents have been throwing at me:

“(Ron Paul) wants to cut spending on our military industrial complex because he believes in a weaker foreign policy.”

“Ron Paul has become a complete nutcase conspiratorialist quasi-Anti-Semitic leftwing American-hating nutball.”

“Ron Paul is out of touch with this district and it is time for him to move on…Dr. No Must Go!”

These quotes come directly from my opponents’ campaign literature and websites. We cannot let these attacks stand.

I plan to fight back and will mount an aggressive campaign. Carol, my family and my staff are already working very hard, but I need your immediate support.

How Government Drives Up College Tuitions

This is several months old, but it is fantastic. How can anyone possibly oppose college tuition subsidies? Please listen and learn. Like most government programs, government tuition subsidies punish exactly the people they presume to help.

Yale University

1810-1852 tuition = $33/year or 1.65 ounces of gold
1918 tuition = $160/year (dollars were inflated during WWI) = 8.4 ounces of gold = 32 days of manual labor
2009 tuition = $36,500/year or about 33 ounces of gold = 550 days of manual labor

This was caused not by freedom or greed. It was caused by reckless government subsidies.

Recovery Propaganda

Leave it to the WSJ to report the truth – and then try to paper over it:

Sales taxes declined 9% to $70 billion in the third quarter compared with the year-ago period, the Census Bureau said. Income taxes plunged 12% to about $58 billion. Together, sales and income taxes make up roughly half of state and local tax revenue.

The WSJ then goes on to opine:

State and local tax revenues tend to lag behind the downturns as well as the upturns in the economy because of the time it takes for collections to catch up with depressed store sales and diminished incomes.

This is true for income taxes.

It is absolutely false when it comes to sales taxes.

As someone who ran a registered establishment for more than a decade that was responsible for filing and paying sales taxes (I signed more returns “under penalty of perjury” than I can count during those years!) I can state that it is an absolute fact that sales tax returns are filed and monies are remitted MONTHLY – if there is an upturn in business – an actual upturn – it shows up NOT MORE THAN ONE MONTH LATER in sales tax receipts. Period. (Read more from market-ticker.denninger.net)

The False Promise of Energy Self-Sufficiency

All the goods and services of modern life are the result of the division of labor carried to immense proportions. Self-sufficiency in anything, whether it be energy or toilet paper, means that we should restrict the division of labor to some extent. Think of our economic world as a bulls-eye. The small dot in the middle would be the goods and services represented by a subsistence economy, such as that of the North American Indian tribes. Small bands of people provided everything they consumed themselves. As capital and the division of labor expand, we move further out on the rings and the size of the economy grows exponentially larger. Instead of hunting our own food and weaving our own clothes, we rely upon the specialized skills of others, who perform only small pieces of the entire process but who perform their process unbelievably efficiently and productively. The division of labor expands to such a degree that we no longer understand how most goods that we consume are produced. We take all this for granted, yet it is a miracle of the free market. The more people engaged in the division of labor, the greater will be the total amount of goods and services available. Of course, the largest possible extension of the division of labor, until we trade with alien worlds, is the entire population of planet earth. (You can be assured that shortly after encountering our first alien civilization, entrepreneurs will be looking for trading opportunities!)

It is clear from this explanation that reverting backward from a more extensive division of labor society to a less extensive one means that society must accept a lower standard of living. There are two main causes for such an unfortunate occurrence—war and misguided economic policy. (Read more from patrickbarron.blogspot.com)

Israeli columnist asks forbidden question

There’s a question we Israelis won’t ask ourselves about the Palestinians, especially not about Gaza. The question is taboo. Not only won’t anyone ask it out loud, but very, very few people will dare ask it in the privacy of their own minds.

However, I think it’s time we start asking it, privately and in public. If we don’t, I think there’s going to be Operation Cast Lead II, then Operation Cast Lead III, and each one is going to be worse than the last, and the consequences for Palestinians and Israelis are going to be unimaginable.

The question we have to ask ourselves is this: If anybody treated us like we’re treating the people in Gaza, what would we do?

We don’t want to go there, do we? And because we don’t, we make it our business not to see, hear or think about how, indeed, we are treating the people in Gaza.

All these shocked dignitaries, all these reports, these details, these numbers – thousands of destroyed this and tens of thousands of destroyed that. Rubble, sewage, malnutrition, crying babies, humanitarian crises – who can keep up? Who cares? They did it to themselves. Where to for lunch?

IT’S NOT that we can’t imagine life in Gaza. It’s that we are determined not to try to imagine. If we did, we might not stop there. Next we might try to imagine what it would be like if our country were in the condition in which we left Gaza. And sooner or later we might try to imagine what we would do if we were living over here like they’re living over there. (Read more from jpost.com)

Chertoff Lobbying for Government purchase of full body scanners

Michael Chertoff, Former Department of Homeland Security, is the head of the Chertoff Group, the lead cheerleader for what is being called the Full Body Scanner Lobby, reports the Washington Post and the Washington Examiner.

Ever since the Christmas Day Bomb Scare, Chertoff has been making the rounds championing the Full Body Scanners as a way to detect hidden explosive devices.

Here is a Chertoff quote from the New York Times on December 29th.“If they’d been deployed, this would pick up this kind of device,” Michael Chertoff, the former homeland security secretary, said in an interview, referring to the packet of chemicals hidden in the underwear of the Nigerian man who federal officials say tried to blow up the Northwest Airlines flight.

A few days later the Washington Post revealed that Chertoff represents Rapiscan – a maker of full body scanners drawing criticism of groups who oppose full body scanners (Read more from nowpublic.com)

The crooks have been in charge for a long time.

Fed Attempting the Impossible

Fed Chief Edges Closer to Using Rates to Pop Bubbles
Bernanke Sees Monetary Policy as Potential Antidote, but Blames Lax Regulation — Not Central Bank Policies — for Housing Crisis

ATLANTA — Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke cracked the door open a bit more to the idea of raising interest rates if a new financial bubble emerges.

He also mounted a vigorous defense against critics who say it was the Fed’s low-interest-rate policies over the past decade that caused the last housing bubble. Instead, he said, the problem was lax regulation, which permitted banks to issue a slew of exotic mortgages that households later had trouble paying.

We must be especially vigilant in ensuring that the recent experiences are not repeated,” Mr. Bernanke said in a speech Sunday at the American Economic Association’s annual meeting here. Better regulation is his first line of defense against future crises. (Read more from online.wsj.com)

Commentary by Patrick Barron: The Fed is trying to do the impossible–pump massive amounts of money into the economy without causing another bubble. So, it thinks it can regulate away bubbles and malinvestment. This is possible only if its regulations are so onerous that they destroy production. The Fed should stop monetary inflation, stop monetizing the debt, and abolish financial regulations.

The Case Against Protectionism

As a general concept, free trade has many supporters. Most of us agree that trade with other nations is a good thing. We get stuff that we would not otherwise have and/or it is much cheaper. Examples include many food items that grow only in special climates, such as fruits and vegetables. Some foodstuffs cannot be grown here, or they can be grown only in special climate-controlled facilities. If the U.S. prohibited the importation of these foreign foods, we would not have them at all or they would be very high priced and, therefore, not available on the mass market. Therefore, it is not difficult to advocate free trade in these items, although even here the U.S. shamefully prohibits the free importation of sugar cane from poor Caribbean nations and corn from poor African nations, just to name two of the most egregious protectionist policies. These are nothing more than gifts to mostly rich American sugar and corn producers, at the expense not only of the American consumer but also, perhaps more importantly, at the expense of poor farmers in the Caribbean and Africa. (Read more from patrickbarron.blogspot.com)

Recovery Propaganda

The surge in commodities “is a reflection of extremely strong demand in the emerging world, and growing hopes of stronger demand in the developed world,” said Jim O’Neill, head of global economic research at Goldman Sachs in London. It is “encouraging so long as it isn’t too persistent.” (From online.wsj.com)

Conspicuously absent is any mention of the gigantic quantities of money being printed all around the word.

German Business Journal Questions 9/11

“FOCUS Money”, is presenting most of the crucial arguments and contradictions on five glossy pages. Among other questions the article suggests that the collapse of the World Trade Center could have been a controlled demolition.

In addition, the article suggests serious doubts about the “madness” of the critics, which are usually called “conspriracy theorists”.

The magazine states, that it is “not only serious politicians who do not want to believe the official version any more “, but also, “there are also thousands of scientists, who question 9/11″.

Author of the article is Oliver Janich. He works as a freelance journalist for the Financial Times Germany, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Euro& Finance and is a regular columnist in Focus Money.

Focus-Money is a weekly business magazine and is currently the second-popular business publication with a weekly circulation of 145,788 copies sold. However, the actual range is much higher and amounts to approximately 450,000 to 720,000 readers. The magazine is published by the Burda-Verlag in Munich.

The first page of the article shows pictures of 9/11 skeptics: Charlie Sheen, Sharon Stone, Rosie O’Donnell William Rodriguez (next to GW Bush), former Governor Jesse Ventura, Richard Gage, Federal Judge Dieter Deiseroth and many others.

The rest of the article is packed with information. Evidence of controlled demolition of the buildings, criticism of the fire theory, the questions on the interceptors, WTC 7 and the Pentagon. There is talk of the “impossible flight maneuvers,” the resignation of Senator Max Cleland who is quoted as saying “It’s a fraud, a national scandal” and of the myriad of lies to the Commission, hindering the investigation. The mysterious death of Barry Jenning, a former Deputy Director of Emergency Services Department of the City of New York is also mentioned. He had saved many people from WTC 7 , and covered in dust gave a live interview on ABC and then much later for “Loose Change” maker Dylan Avery. (Read more from dprogram.net)

The Myth of European Socialism

Euro Zone Grapples With Debt Crisis
The European Commission warns that public finances in half of the 16 euro-zone nations are at high risk of becoming unsustainable

Governments will spend the next year and beyond balancing the urgent need to fix public-sector debt and deficits — without imperiling what appears to be a feeble economic recovery.
(Read more from online.wsj.com)

Commentary by Patrick Barron: Many people support increasing social welfare programs in the U.S. by citing the experience of Europe; that is, that Europe has far more generous welfare benefits than the U.s. and seems to be doing “just fine”. Well, the European Commission itself disputes the long-term viability of many of Europe’s finances.

[But] None of the welfare plans in any of the Eurozone countries are financially sound. They are simply state-sponsored Ponzi schemes that must crash when the demographic reality of a declining birthrate makes their payment impossible.