How The Administration Should Negotiate with Putin

By now, everyone knows how Putin has invaded the Ukraine and threatened to annex the Crimea. Poeple are saying that the U.S. response has been weak, others are saying that we need to use Military force, but I'd like to present a response that I think Reagan himself would use, if I were the head negotiator for the U.S.

Mr. Putin, back when Bill Clinton was President, John Major headed up the UK and Boris Yeltsin was President of the Russian Federation, we all got together with the Chinese and offered Ukrainian prime minister peace and security, in order that the Ukraine to give up their sizable Nuclear arsenal along with their army.  We left them defenseless.  The world, meaning the U.S.A, promised them that their borders would not come under attack and that we would all protect them.  Additionally we even told them they would be considered for membership in the EU. Our President, Mr. Obama, reaffirmed this treaty in 2009. You Sir... Mr. Putin, are now breaking that promise, but we must keep ours. 

Mr. Putin, I say to you that you have a very short memory.  In the 1980's our President, Ronald Reagan saw the weaknesses of the U.S.S.R. and came up with a plan to destroy the Republic without firing a single shot.  The Weapon of choice was Economic in nature and it's something that the U.S. has become incredibly proficient at.  If you go against us, you die.  And we don't even have to use our formidable military might to do it.  Back then, just as today you're hard currency reserves were earned by selling Oil and Natural Gas to the Europeans.  Reagan worked both with Congress to eliminate hundreds of regulations in the Oil and Gas business, along with increased rights for mining on Federal lands, along with working with the Saudi's to increase their production.  All the efforts paid off within 2 short years of Reagan being elected to office.  By 1982 oil had Collapsed to $30.00 a barrel, around half the price it was selling for in the late 70's  and by 1986, ended up trading at less than 9 bucks a barrel!  By 1991 the Soviet Union ceased to exist.  If you think we've forgotten how to wage an Economic War, we haven't and we will use all of options to force you back to the table.

Currently, 30% of all Natural Gas consumed in the EU comes from the Russian Federation, but if you continue down this path, you will force us to take drastic action.  

As I'm sure you're well aware of, the U.S. currently has laws in place to where our companies can't drill off the Eastern nor Western Coasts.  We currently only allow drilling in the Gulf Coast, and tiny portions of Alaska, equal to less than 2% of the total land mass.  Fully 85% of all Federal Lands are off limits to Oil and Gas recovery, but that could change.

All we would have to do in the U.S. is to increase the available lands from 15% to 20% and it would create such a worldwide glut of Oil and Gas that the prices would collapse to pre 1987 levels!

We will give U.S. Oil and Gas producers the same preferential Tax treatment currently given to High Tech companies and Banks, cutting their effective tax rates in half.  We will stipulate that all of this comes at a cost.  They CANNOT do business with you!

Additionally, to help our EU allies, the U.S. will begin to build out Natural Gas Liquification facilities at all of our Docks around the country.  We will provide subsidies to our export companies to where they will ALWAYS beat your price for Natural Gas, and we will bankrupt you ALL OVER AGAIN, just like Reagan BANKRUPTED the old Soviet Union!  We will do a repeat of history and BANKRUPT the Russian Federation. We have the Economic Might to do it, and so help me God, we will do it. Now you pull your troops back, or your country will be reduced to a BEGGAR nation in a single decade!

For 600,000 Germans - Green Energy Is Just Too Expensive

Hundreds of thousands of households in Germany can not pay their electricity bills anymore and are therefore suspended from the grid. The rising prices of the energy transition have exacerbated the situation and while some get their Electricity restored, after saving their pennies, on any given day about 600,000 Germans are living without electricity.

Just to give you a comparison of how high German rates are, consider this.  At the end of this article it says that they're looking to keep rates at around 3.6 cents per KW.  This translates to roughly 4.5 cents per KWh.  Here in South Florida we pay 0.08527 per KWh for the 1st 1000KW, then it JUMPS to 0.105234 once you go over.  Now, there's also an additional $5.90 Billing fee, but either way the German rates are at least FOUR TIMES what we're paying here in the U.S.  Kind of like how Obama PROMISED that our Electricity rates would sky rocket under his policies.  Let's all thank GOD he hasn't had a chance to implement most of those policies!

Many people in Germany can not pay their electricity bills. And energy prices continue to rise unabated. The President of the Association of Social VdK, Ulrike Mascher, accuses the federal government of not properly thinking through the social dimension of it's energy policy.

"For low income households, the rising electricity costs is more than they can handle," said the head of Germany's largest social group. The board of the Consumer Rhine-Westphalia, Klaus Mueller estimates: "Ten to 15 percent of the population struggling to finance the ever-rising energy costs."

Each year, hundreds of thousands of households are disconnected from the grid, because they can't afford it any longer, and while many get their power restored, many endure weeks and even months with no power.

Renewable Energy Leaves Many Poor Germans with No Power

Here are low-income earners and pensioners even more than the recipients of Government low cost heating programs. "Previously, energy poverty was a marginal phenomenon, but now it has become for many an everyday issue," said Mueller.

According to the survey of consumer protection at the utility is locked at around 600,000 households per year due to unpaid bills of electricity.Mainly due to the strong expansion of renewable energy sources, electricity prices had increased in 2011 by around ten percent.

400 energy suppliers have raised prices

According to a survey of the price comparison portal Verivox.  The figures show that already some 400 utilities in the first half of 2012 their prices by an average of 3.5 percent, have raised or announced plans to do so. In the coming year is likely to be Verivox specification, inflation accelerated again. "For the foreseeable increase in network charges and the EEG surcharge, you can expect price increases of about 4.6 percent," said a spokesman Verivox.

According to the newspaper "Welt am Sonntag" from the federal policy would be if only the so-called EEG surcharge to subsidize the consumers with the supply of green electricity in the coming year once again clearly today 3.6 to up to 5.2 per cent kilowatt-hour increase.

Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) was announced but not in the past year, the cost burden on consumers by the Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG) should "not exceed permanently" 3.6 cents per kilowatt hour.

Künast makes the government responsible

The President of the Greens, Renate Künast gives the federal government to blame for the increase in energy poverty. "Black and Yellow has energy-intensive firms in the network charges a massive relief - this loss of revenue drives up costs for consumers and SMEs in the air," said Künast. "This social imbalances are consciously organized."

The FDP's top candidate for the upcoming state elections in North Rhine-Westphalia, Christian Lindner, accuses the CDU to belittle the problem of rising energy prices. This power remains affordable, it need new coal-and gas-fired power plants and a permanent monitoring of the impact of the Renewable Energy Act.

"If necessary, must be adjusted again here," says Lindner. "In fact, rising energy prices, the economy take the pliers because they increase the one hand, the production cost and limit the other hand, the massive purchasing power of consumers." This is a vicious circle.

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I've tried to clean up the Google Translation, but didn't know where to go with it so I left some part of this article a bit murky.  You can see the original German article here.

http://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article106236425/Strom-ist-fuer-viele-Deutsche-unbezahlbar-geworden.html

Obama quietly continues to defend Bush's terror policies | McClatchy

Obama quietly continues to defend Bush's terror policies | McClatchy
WASHINGTON — Although the FBI has acknowledged it improperly obtained thousands of Americans' phone records for years, the Obama administration continues to assert that the bureau can obtain them without any formal legal process or court oversight.

The FBI revealed this stance in a newly released report, troubling critics who'd hoped the bureau had been chastened enough by its own abuses to drop such a position.

In further support of the legal authority, however, the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel backed the FBI in a written opinion issued this month.

The opinion by the OLC — the section that wrote the memos that justified enhanced interrogation techniques during the last administration — appears to be yet another sign that the Obama administration can be just as assertive as Bush's in claiming sweeping and controversial anti-terrorism powers.

The Justice Department's watchdog, the inspector general, said the OLC opinion has "significant policy implications that need to be considered by the FBI, the Department, and the Congress."

"The FBI says that this kind of activity is in the past," said Michael German, a former FBI agent who's now the American Civil Liberties Union's policy counsel. "But if they're saying that they have a continuing legal authority that means it's not in the past."

In another similarity to Bush era-legal decisions to keep legal theories under wraps, Obama's Justice Department refused to release to McClatchy the OLC opinion, despite the administration's vow to be more open than its predecessors.

The little-noticed revelation about the OLC opinion and the FBI's legal position appears in a heavily redacted section of an inspector general's report released Wednesday.

In the report, Inspector General Glenn Fine concluded the FBI committed egregious violations of the law when it obtained thousands of telephone records without court oversight or through any formal legal process.

The report described a "casual" environment in which FBI agents and employees of telecom companies treated Americans' telephone records so cavalierly that one senior FBI counter-terrorism official said getting access to them was as easy as "having an ATM in your living room."

Yet it also stated that "the OLC agreed with the FBI that under certain circumstances (word or words redacted) allows the FBI to ask for and obtain these records on a voluntary basis from the providers, without legal process or a qualifying emergency."

FBI and Justice Department officials refused to comment on that assertion.

In a letter sent Friday, Sens. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., Richard Durbin, D-Ill., and Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, demanded that Attorney General Eric Holder release a copy of the memo.

"Although much of the information about the OLC opinion is redacted in the public version of the (inspector general) report, the opinion appears to have important implications for the rights of Americans," the senators wrote.

FBI Director Robert Mueller has said that the informal practice of requesting telephone records as described in the report was stopped in 2006 when he found out about it from the inspector general.

Since then, it appears the bureau now refrains from using the authority it continues to assert, according to another heavily redacted section of the inspector general's report.

"However, that could change, and we believe appropriate controls on such authority should be considered now, in light of the FBI's past practices and the OLC opinion," Fine warned.

Privacy and open government advocates called on the Justice Department to release the opinion outright.

"There's a tremendous mystery as to what this legal basis is," said Kurt Opsahl, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates privacy protections for technology. "It does not seem like a legal justification should be a national security secret."

Last March, Attorney General Eric Holder released Bush administration OLC memos justifying interrogation methods that Bush's Justice Department had refused to release.

"It is my goal to make OLC opinions available when possible while still protecting national security information and ensuring robust internal executive branch debate and decision-making," he said at the time.

Such rhetoric hasn't necessarily translated into action, however, according to the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, an open-government group. CREW released a report this week that criticized the Obama administration for recent decisions to withhold information.

"Judging by CREW's interactions with various federal agencies over the past year, the promise of transparency and openness has not translated into new government-wide . . . policies," the group said.

The American Civil Liberties Union, meanwhile, filed a lawsuit Friday to try to compel the Justice Department to make public a report from Justice's Office of Professional Responsibility that examines possible ethics violations by lawyers who wrote the interrogation memos.

Holder had said in late November the report was finished and would be released soon.

Friday was also the deadline for executive branch agencies to release certain "high-value" data as part of President Obama's open government directive. Open government experts, however, said it remains to be seen how useful the information will be since the agencies themselves are determining what to divulge.

As of Friday afternoon, for example, the IRS had released its files tracking citizens' changes of addresses and the Department of Housing and Urban Development posted federal housing inspection data.

Child's Pay 2 - The Ten Trillion Dollar Sequel

Move On featured an ad a while back where they asked the question. Who will pay for Bush's One Trillion Dollar Deficit. The answer, according to their video was the Children.



Now it seems that RedState has Hijacked the Ad to ask who's going to pay for Obama's Ten Trillion Dollar Deficit!

And here's the Original Ad by Move On....

Darth Matrix Obama Smith

I came across this video, very entertaining:

Michelle Obama's Not for Profit Hospitals' "Windfall Profits"

I was browsing around the Internet when I came across this Website, ObamaTruth.org. I always felt that Obama was disingenuous, but WOW, I was completely unaware of this:
The big problem I have with this is that Obama is talking about having the Government take over the Oil business because of Price Gouging, while Oil companies are making less than an 8% markup. In the mean time, Obama's Wife's Hospital:

1. Marks up their services to the Uninsured by over 350%
2. Is supposed to be Non Profit, but instead earned over 100 Million Dollars!
   
3. DOESN'T provide the uninsured a discount (despite windfall profits).
4. Spends 10 Million dollars a year on collection agents, despite windfall profits and non-profit status!
   
5. Former CEO walked away with 4.58 million in compensation.
6. Did nothing when the hospital refused to give more Charity Care, in light of Windfall Profits.
7. Michelle Obama received a MASSIVE 200K raise, to over 300K a year!
   
8. Finally, Obama has accepted over 100 Thousand Dollars in Campaign contributions over the past several years.

I decided to start digging for more though, and here's what I found:

1. Michelle Obama's raise actually propelled her salary past other VP's who had been there FAR Longer then she had.
2. Of the 98 Million in Earmarks that Obama has spent of your tax payer dollars, 1 Million went to the Hospital for a proposed pavilion. (This is a Hospital who had over 100 Million in profits, while it's a Non Profit Hospital!)
3. Obama's wife's hospital is also involved in a nasty lawsuit where the uninsured are claiming that they were not only incredibly overcharged for their stays there, but that they relentlessly hounded them for the money, while their supposed to be a Non Profit!

I've expressed my views on Health care, but for someone who claims to be for the Poor and the Middle class, Obama seems to have absolutely no regard for them, at least when it comes to his and his wife's profits!

Obama's Electoral College Outlook

OK, so the results are in and it's an Obama win on the Democrat's side. However, let's take a look at Bush's win from the last election, you know, the one with the "Vote or Die" campaign from "P-Diddy" that was supposed to be an ASSURED WIN for the Democrats.

Yet the Democrats, despite the Media Machine's full backing barely won 19 states. So what does it look like this time around with Obama on the ticket?

First, the Democrats will lose even more states. Pennsylvania, and the Guns and Religion stuff won't play too well over there, and so they will probably go for McCain. Also Minnesota has had their fill of Democrats and have an all Republican legislature, so they're probably going back to being a Red State.

On the flip side, there's a possibility that Obama will finally pull Georgia away from Republicans and who knows, he might even be able to clinch New Mexico and maybe even Colorado. Even though he had a big win in Iowa, I think the Reverend Wright stuff permanently damaged his image there, so even though CNN and others are saying he can convert them this time around, I SERIOUSLY doubt that will happen. In addition I think he just might have enough support in Virginia to pull them over to his side this time around as well.

Here's what I've come up with:
McCain 284
Obama 253

Sorry, still a loss Barry. Maybe next time.

Discuss

The Democrats Have a Nominee: It's Clinton!

WSJ Reported... "The Democrats Have a Nominee: It's Obama! Other than ensuring the Greatest Show on Earth will continue, does it matter that Hillary Clinton defeated Barack Obama Tuesday in Pennsylvania by nine-plus points? Barack Obama is the nominee."

This reporting though, fails to take certain things into account. The first is the entire reason why the 'Super Delegates' were created in the first place. It wasn't to mirror what the party wanted, it was created for exactly the reasons that the WSJ stated about the Democrat Party Primary Process, "No centrist can secure the party's nomination in a primary system dominated by left-liberal activists". Which is fine, if left leaning leberals are electable, but as the past has shown us, they are not. Obama, is nothing more than a modern day McGovern, completely unelectable, or did the newspaper not get the news? They wrote in this same article that McGovern (1972), Mondale ('84), Dukakis ('88), Gore ('00) and Kerry ('04), were exactly the types of far leaning left liberals that Middle America won't vote for. Obama is no different.
North Carolina is a perfect example of the massive problems the Democrats have if they side with Obama, According to Rasmussen, even though as of April 5th, Obama leads Clinton by 20 points, over half of Clinton Supporters say they won't vote for Obama against McCain, if he wins the nomination. North Carolina is just one of the 30 States that went with Bush in the 2000 General election against Gore, and they're also one of the 31 States that went with Bush in the 2004 General Election vs Kerry. The WSJ fails to see that in addition to having a huge block of voters that won't vote for Obama in the general election, Clinton has also won the states with the Most Electoral College votes. Ultimately most Obama voters would vote for Clinton in the General Election, which makes her the more electable of the two candidates. Also, Obama voters tend to be younger and less likely to vote than the Older voters that Clinton has.
One last thing that the WSJ fails to see is that both Florida and Michigan's vote WILL count in the general election, and if the Democrat Party fails to take them into account, they will lose the general election.
If the Super Delegates don't see this or won't act on it, then why have the Super Delegate system in the first place? They might as well adopt the same system the Republicans have and avoid all these headaches in the future.

read more | digg story

Obama is the change that America has tried to hide

"If Obama were in any sense mediocre, he would be forgotten by now. He is, in fact, a remarkable human being, not perfect but humanly stunning, like King was and like Mandela is. He is the change America has been trying desperately and for centuries to hide, ignore, kill." ....

So now English newspapers are trying to tell us how to vote. Of course, I'm sure many of them would like to see the U.S. descend into the Socialist Economies that they have over there in Europe. What American DOESN'T need is more Socialism, more big government, more Government controls and regulations and more of the same of what they have in Europe. What I find amazing about Europe is that these guys have been around for thousands of years, and yet here comes America and in just a few hundred years becomes the pre-eminate Super Power of the world. We have an economy that is unmatched by any other country in the world, our populace enjoys a level of weath and comfort unmatched anywhere in the world, we drive the biggest cars, live in the biggest homes, have the most disposable income and live the most lavish lifestyles, yet the Europeans want us to be more like them, instead of them being more like us. Strange yet true, this is the world we live in.

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