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Saturday, October 25, 2008
CERTIFICATE OF LIVE MUSLIM KENYAN BIRTH TO A WHITE LADY
Barack Obama’s actual birth certificate!
* Thanks to Tim Blair
Click on image to enlarge!
From Atlas:
JUDGE DISMISSES BIRTH CERTIFICATE LAWSUIT: ANYBODY GOT STANDING?
Philip Berg’s lawsuit has been dismissed by Clinton appointed Judge Surrick on the grounds that Berg lacked standing.
The analysis of the COLB presented on Obama’s fight the smears website should have been the basis of Berg’s lawsuit because it presents “reasonable suspicion”. Berg’s conjecture or speculation is irrelevant. If you remember, I was not pleased that is was Berg when he filed. The case must be made on evidence not speculation.
Prosecutor and reader John Jay remarked in the comments back in July:
Techdude is not running for President of the United States. His analysis is not subject to a standard of “proof beyond a reasonable” doubt.
Barrack Hussein Obama is running for President of the United States, and he has to meet and prove establish that he meets certain requirements to do so, e.g., age and citizenship. He has proofs of constitutional dimension in that regard, as must meet statutory and regulatory standards in filing for his candidacy, and proving his citizen ship and age.
He has political “proofs” of honesty and integrity as well.
The filing and.or flaunting of phonied up documents satisfy none of the proof requirements he faces, and would not in court.
This is a sad day for America. I cannot believe we are going to yawn and just take this
LAWSUIT AGAINST OBAMA DISMISSED BY PHILADELPHIA JUDGE America’s Right (hat tip peach)
The order and memorandum came down at approximately 6:15 p.m. on Friday. Philip Berg’s lawsuit challenging Illinois Sen. Barack Obama’s constitutional eligibility to serve as president of the United States had been dismissed by the Hon. R. Barclay Surrick on grounds that the Philadelphia attorney and former Deputy Attorney General for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania lacked standing.
Surrick, it seemed, was not satisfied with the nature of evidence provided by Berg to support his allegations.
Various accounts, details and ambiguities from Obama’s childhood form the basis of Plaintiff’s allegation that Obama is not a natural born citizen of the United States. To support his contention, Plaintiff cites sources as varied as the Rainbow Edition News Letter … and the television news tabloid Inside Edition. These sources and others lead Plaintiff to conclude that Obama is either a citizen of his father’s native Kenya, by birth there or through operation of U.S. law; or that Obama became a citizen of Indonesia by relinquishing his prior citizenship (American or Kenyan) when he moved there with his mother in 1967. Either way, in Plaintiff’s opinion, Obama does not have the requisite qualifications for the Presidency that the Natural Born Citizen Clause mandates. The Amended Complaint alleges that Obama has actively covered up this information and that the other named Defendants are complicit in Obama’s cover-up.
A judge’s attitude toward the factual foundation of a plaintiff’s claims is an essential factor in understanding just who indeed has standing to sue. The question running to the heart of the standing doctrine is whether or not the plaintiff indeed has a personal stake in the outcome of the otherwise justiciable matter being adjudicated. As has been discussed before many times here at America’s Right, a plaintiff wishing to have standing to sue must show (1) a particularized injury-in-fact, (2) evidence showing that that the party being sued actually caused the plaintiff’s particularized injury-in-fact, and (3) that adjudication of the matter would actually provide redress.
In this case, Judge Surrick’s attitude toward the evidence presented by Berg to support his allegations figures in heavily because, while there is a three-pronged test to standing in itself, there is no definitive test by which the court can determine whether a certain harm is enough to satisfy the first element of that three-pronged test by showing true injury-in-fact. Traditionally, it hasn’t taken much to satisfy the need for an injury-in-fact, but as the plaintiff’s claimed injury is perceived as being more remote, more creative, or more speculative, the injury-in-fact requirement becomes more difficult to satisfy.
[....]
Who, who does have standing? According to the Hon. R. Barclay Surrick, that’s completely up to Congress to decide.
If, through the political process, Congress determines that citizens, voters, or party members should police the Constitution’s eligibility requirements for the Presidency, then it is free to pass laws conferring standing on individuals like Plaintiff. Until that time, voters do not have standing to bring the sort of challenge that Plaintiff attempts to bring in the Amended Complaint.
Read it all. But like I said, the analysis presented at Atlas should have been entered into evidence.
So what if I, we were wrong. I would have egg on my face? I don’t care - I was presented with strong evidence. What was worst the that could happen if we were wrong, a bitchslap from the leftards. So what?
Whats the worst that could happen if we were right. Traitor in the White House.
You weigh it. The judge certainly didn’t.
Judge tosses lawsuit challenging Obama citizenship
Click here to see additional information
The Associated Press
A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit challenging Barack Obama's qualifications to be president.
U.S. District Judge R. Barclay Surrick on Friday night rejected the suit by attorney Philip J. Berg, who alleged that Obama was not a U.S. citizen and therefore ineligible for the presidency. Berg claimed that Obama is either a citizen of his father's native Kenya or became a citizen of Indonesia after he moved there as a boy.
Obama was born in Hawaii to an American mother and a Kenyan father. His parents divorced and his mother married an Indonesian man.
Internet-fueled conspiracy theories question whether Obama is a "natural-born citizen" as required by the Constitution for a presidential candidate and whether he lost his citizenship while living abroad.
Surrick ruled that Berg lacked standing to bring the case, saying any harm from an allegedly ineligible candidate was "too vague and its effects too attenuated to confer standing on any and all voters."
The Petraeus Doctrine
Iraq-style counterinsurgency is fast becoming the U.S. Army’s organizing principle. Is our military preparing to fight the next war, or the last one?
For a military accustomed to quick, easy victories, the trials and tribulations of the Iraq War have come as a rude awakening. To its credit, the officer corps has responded not with excuses but with introspection. One result, especially evident within the U.S. Army, has been the beginning of a Great Debate of sorts.Anyone who cares about the Army’s health should take considerable encouragement from this intellectual ferment. Yet anyone who cares about future U.S. national-security strategy should view the debate with considerable concern: it threatens to encroach upon matters that civilian policy makers, not soldiers, should decide.
What makes this debate noteworthy is not only its substance, but its character—the who and the how.
The military remains a hierarchical organization in which orders come from the top down. Yet as the officer corps grapples with its experience in Iraq, fresh ideas are coming from the bottom up. In today’s Army, the most-creative thinkers are not generals but mid-career officers—lieutenant colonels and colonels.
Like any bureaucracy, today’s military prefers to project a united front when dealing with the outside world, keeping internal dissent under wraps. Nonetheless, the Great Debate is unfolding in plain view in publications outside the Pentagon’s purview, among them print magazines such as Armed Forces Journal, the Web-based Small Wars Journal, and the counterinsurgency blog Abu Muqawama.
The chief participants in this debate—all Iraq War veterans—fixate on two large questions. First, why, after its promising start, did Operation Iraqi Freedom go so badly wrong? Second, how should the hard-earned lessons of Iraq inform future policy? Hovering in the background of this Iraq-centered debate is another war that none of the debaters experienced personally—namely, Vietnam.
The protagonists fall into two camps: Crusaders and Conservatives.
The Crusaders consist of officers who see the Army’s problems in Iraq as self-inflicted. According to members of this camp, things went awry because rigidly conventional senior commanders, determined “never again” to see the Army sucked into a Vietnam-like quagmire, had largely ignored unconventional warfare and were therefore prepared poorly for it. Typical of this generation is Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, once the top U.S. commander in Baghdad, who in late 2003 was still describing the brewing insurgency as “strategically and operationally insignificant,” when the lowliest buck sergeant knew otherwise.
Younger officers critical of Sanchez are also committed to the slogan “Never again,” but with a different twist: never again should the officer corps fall prey to the willful amnesia to which the Army succumbed after Vietnam, when it turned its back on that war.
Among the Crusaders’ most influential members is Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, a West Pointer and Rhodes Scholar with a doctorate from Oxford University. In 2002, he published a book, impeccably timed, titled Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons From Malaya and Vietnam. After serving in Iraq as a battalion operations officer, Nagl helped rewrite the Army’s counterinsurgency manual and commanded the unit that prepares U.S. soldiers to train Iraqi security forces. (Earlier this year, he left the Army to accept a position with a Washington think tank.)
To Nagl, the lessons of the recent past are self-evident. The events of 9/11, he writes, “conclusively demonstrated that instability anywhere can be a real threat to the American people here at home.” For the foreseeable future, political conditions abroad rather than specific military threats will pose the greatest danger to the United States.
Instability creates ungoverned spaces in which violent anti-American radicals thrive. Yet if instability anywhere poses a threat, then ensuring the existence of stability everywhere—denying terrorists sanctuary in rogue or failed states—becomes a national-security imperative. Define the problem in these terms, and winning battles becomes less urgent than pacifying populations and establishing effective governance.
War in this context implies not only coercion but also social engineering. As Nagl puts it, the security challenges of the 21st century will require the U.S. military “not just to dominate land operations, but to change entire societies.”
Of course, back in the 1960s an earlier experiment in changing entire societies yielded unmitigated disaster—at least that’s how the Army of the 1980s and 1990s chose to remember its Vietnam experience. Crusaders take another view, however. They insist that Vietnam could have been won—indeed was being won, after General Creighton Abrams succeeded General William Westmoreland in 1968 and jettisoned Westmoreland’s heavy-handed search-and-destroy strategy, to concentrate instead on winning Vietnamese hearts and minds. Defeat did not result from military failure; rather, defeat came because the American people lacked patience, while American politicians lacked guts.
The Crusaders’ perspective on Iraq tracks neatly with this revisionist take on Vietnam, with the hapless Sanchez (among others) standing in for Westmoreland, and General David Petraeus—whose Princeton doctoral dissertation was titled “The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam”—as successor to General Abrams. Abrams’s successful if tragically aborted campaign in Vietnam serves as a precursor to Petraeus’s skillfully orchestrated “surge” in Iraq: each demonstrates that the United States can prevail in “stability operations” as long as commanders grasp the true nature of the problem and respond appropriately.
For Nagl, the imperative of the moment is to institutionalize the relevant lessons of Vietnam and Iraq, thereby enabling the Army, he writes, “to get better at building societies that can stand on their own.” That means buying fewer tanks while spending more on language proficiency; curtailing the hours spent on marksmanship ranges while increasing those devoted to studying foreign cultures. It also implies changing the culture of the officer corps. An Army that since Vietnam has self-consciously cultivated a battle-oriented warrior ethos will instead emphasize, in Nagl’s words, “the intellectual tools necessary to foster host-nation political and economic development.”
Although the issue is by no means fully resolved, the evidence suggests that Nagl seems likely to get his way. Simply put, an officer corps that a decade ago took its intellectual cues from General Colin Powell now increasingly identifies itself with the views of General Petraeus. In the 1990s, the Powell Doctrine, with its emphasis on overwhelming force, assumed that future American wars would be brief, decisive, and infrequent. According to the emerging Petraeus Doctrine, the Army (like it or not) is entering an era in which armed conflict will be protracted, ambiguous, and continuous—with the application of force becoming a lesser part of the soldier’s repertoire.
Nagl’s line of argument has not gone unchallenged. Its opponents, the Conservatives, reject the revisionist interpretation of Vietnam and dispute the freshly enshrined conventional narrative on Iraq. Above all, they question whether Iraq represents a harbinger of things to come.
A leading voice in the Conservative camp is Colonel Gian Gentile, a Berkeley graduate with a doctorate in history from Stanford, who currently teaches at West Point. Gentile has two tours in Iraq under his belt. During the second, just before the Petraeus era, he commanded a battalion in Baghdad.
Writing in the journal World Affairs, Gentile dismisses as “a self-serving fiction” the notion that Abrams in 1968 put the United States on the road to victory in Vietnam; the war, he says, was unwinnable, given the “perseverance, cohesion, indigenous support, and sheer determination of the other side, coupled with the absence of any of those things on the American side.” Furthermore, according to Gentile, the post-Vietnam officer corps did not turn its back on that war in a fit of pique; it correctly assessed that the mechanized formations of the Warsaw Pact deserved greater attention than pajama-clad guerrillas in Southeast Asia.
Gentile also takes issue with the triumphal depiction of the Petraeus era, attributing security improvements achieved during Petraeus’s tenure less to new techniques than to a “cash-for-cooperation” policy that put “nearly 100,000 Sunnis, many of them former insurgents, … on the U.S. government payroll.” According to Gentile, in Iraq as in Vietnam, tactics alone cannot explain the overall course of events.
All of this forms a backdrop to Gentile’s core concern: that an infatuation with stability operations will lead the Army to reinvent itself as “a constabulary,” adept perhaps at nation-building but shorn of adequate capacity for conventional war-fighting.
The concern is not idle. A recent article in Army magazine notes that the Army’s National Training Center in Fort Irwin, California, long “renowned for its force-on-force conventional warfare maneuver training,” has now “switched gears,” focusing exclusively on counterinsurgency warfare. Rather than practicing how to attack the hill, its trainees now learn about “spending money instead of blood, and negotiating the cultural labyrinth through rapport and rapprochement.”
The officer corps itself recognizes that conventional-warfare capabilities are already eroding. In a widely circulated white paper, three former brigade commanders declare that the Army’s field-artillery branch—which plays a limited role in stability operations, but is crucial when there is serious fighting to be done—may soon be all but incapable of providing accurate and timely fire support. Field artillery, the authors write, has become a “dead branch walking.”
Gentile does not doubt that counterinsurgencies will figure in the Army’s future. Yet he questions Nagl’s certainty that situations resembling Iraq should become an all-but-exclusive preoccupation. Historically, expectations that the next war will resemble the last one have seldom served the military well.
Embedded within this argument over military matters is a more fundamental and ideologically charged argument about basic policy. By calling for an Army configured mostly to wage stability operations, Nagl is effectively affirming the Long War as the organizing principle of post-9/11 national-security strategy, with U.S. forces called upon to bring light to those dark corners of the world where terrorists flourish. Observers differ on whether the Long War’s underlying purpose is democratic transformation or imperial domination: Did the Bush administration invade Iraq to liberate that country or to control it? Yet there is no disputing that the Long War implies a vast military enterprise undertaken on a global scale and likely to last decades. In this sense, Nagl’s reform agenda, if implemented, will serve to validate—and perpetuate—the course set by President Bush in the aftermath of 9/11.
Gentile understands this. Implicit in his critique of Nagl is a critique of the Bush administration, for which John Nagl serves as a proxy. Gentile’s objection to what he calls Nagl’s “breathtaking” assumption about “the efficacy of American military power to shape events” expresses a larger dissatisfaction with similar assumptions held by the senior officials who concocted the Iraq War in the first place. When Gentile charges Nagl with believing that there are “no limits to what American military power … can accomplish,” his real gripe is with the likes of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz.
For officers like Nagl, the die appears to have been cast. The Long War gives the Army its marching orders. Nagl’s aim is simply to prepare for the inescapable eventuality of one, two, many Iraqs to come.
Gentile resists the notion that the Army’s (and by extension, the nation’s) fate is unalterably predetermined. Strategic choice—to include the choice of abandoning the Long War in favor of a different course—should remain a possibility. The effect of Nagl’s military reforms, Gentile believes, will be to reduce or preclude that possibility, allowing questions of the second order (How should we organize our Army?) to crowd out those of the first (What should be our Army’s purpose?).
The biggest question of all, Gentile writes, is “Who gets to decide this?” Absent a comparably searching Great Debate among the civilians vying to direct U.S. policy—and the prospects that either Senator McCain or Senator Obama will advocate alternatives to the Long War appear slight—the power of decision may well devolve by default upon soldiers. Gentile insists—rightly—that the choice should not be the Army’s to make.
Is the New NSA COMINT Flap Overblown?
'In a war zone, or any military zone including training, COMSEC monitoring is routine'
New allegations by former National Security Agency (NSA) transcribers of Communications Intelligence – especially via satellite phones - between members of the Armed Services and US citizens in Iraq's "Green Zone" and friends and family in the States were listened to, recorded, transcribed, and passed around has sparked a new round of outrage over the Agency's counterterror (CT) communications eavesdropping activities.
The two former NSA intercept transcribers’ spoke to ABC News just prior to publication of journalist Jim Bamford’s hardly transparent contemptuous new book on the NSA, "The Shadow Factory.” Both were interviewed by Bamford for the book.
The two ex-NSA transcribers are Adrienne Kinne, a former Army Reserve Arab linguist who two years ago traveled Vermont giving speeches promoting the impeachment of President Bush, and former Augusta, Georgia Metro Spirit newspaper staff writer, David Murfee Faulk, a former Navy Arab linguist.
Veteran Intelligence Community (IC) counterterror analysts said while they do not condone the dissemination of transcripts of intercepted “phone sex” and other intimate conversations like has been emphasized in recent reporting, they stressed that there were, and continue to be, legitimate concerns about classified information, military and intelligence operational activities and other secret and sensitive information inadvertently being divulged in such conversations from war and conflict zones, especially by members of the military with family and friends talking on satellite phones.
“These are legitimate concerns – that there may be unauthorized disclosures of classified and sensitive military and operational details,” the officials said.
“Ho hum. In a war zone, or any military zone including training, COMSEC monitoring is routine,” former CIA and IC officer, Robert Steele, told HSToday.us, adding that for him, this is a non-story he sees “no real interest in.”
Still, media reports and bloggers continue to insist conflict zones in which the US military is involved is off limits to COMSEC monitoring. One blogger’s headline clearly was suggestive that it’s wrong: “NSA Spying on US Soldiers,” it read.
Similarly, ABC News reported that when it asked for comment on accounts of intimate and private phone calls of military officers being passed around, including reputed “phone sex,” ABC News said a US intelligence official told it "all employees of the US government" should expect that their telephone conversations could be monitored as part of an effort to safeguard security and "information assurance."
Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman told Army Times that members of the Armed Forces should be aware that when they use any government equipment to communicate, “it’s subject to monitoring.”
“Every time I turn on my computer, it tells me that,” Whitman was quoted saying, adding, “service members understand that. They’re trained in that.”
A Senate aide who spoke to Army Times on the condition of anonymity “agreed that military personnel probably know that their overseas phone calls to the States may be overheard by US intelligence agencies and, in some cases, by foreign intelligence agents.
As IC sources explained to HSToday.us, there are legitimate concerns about military operations security that’s been raised by the ruckus over the NSA-controlled communications intercepts which have been left out of all the reporting.
The CT officials said it’s no secret that there have been problems with armed services members wrongly divulging operational details, especially on satellite and other communications systems that could just as easily be intercepted by terrorists or hostile foreign governments, like Iran, which is known to have its own communications intercept assets in Iraq trying to listen in on potentially unsecured communications systems used by military and US citizens.
As one of the former NSA linguists told ABC News, “personal phone calls of American officers – mostly in the [Iraqi] Green Zone – calling home to the United States, talking to their spouses, and sometimes their girlfriends, sometimes on the same days, sometimes one phone call following another,” were routinely intercepted.
Other IC officials noted that foreign-originated communications, even placed to the US, are legitimate targets of interception, although if they do not involve terrorists they should not be being stored, catalogued, referenced, shared, etc.
Additionally, interception of satellite phone communications abroad does not require first having to have a warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
The concern over improper disclosure of secret and sensitive information “does walk a fine line” with regard to what is and isn’t supposed to be the target of CT COMINT interception activities. As a Heritage Foundation blogger noted, “NSA employees have no business entertaining themselves by listening in on phone sex. The employees involved should be disciplined.”
Kinne and Faulk admitted that some of the intercepts had helped to identify possible terrorist plots in Iraq and saved American lives.
"IED's were disarmed before they exploded, that people who were intending to harm US forces were captured ahead of time," Faulk said.
Another peculiar aspect of this story is that it’s even news.
While it’s been touted in all the ink this story has received that the ABC report is a new revelation and “is the first time any of the actual intercept operators … [have] come forward,” the two former NSA linguists ABC News interviewed not only voiced their complaints publicly and in a blog much earlier, but they also knew of each other.
Former journalist David Swanson (now a pro-impeach Bush/Cheney activist), stated that ABC News’s position that “the two former intercept operators” had “never met and did not know of the other's allegations … is absolute nonsense … Faulk learned of Kinne's story by reading it on my website,” Swanson declared. “I reported Kinne's story on July 1, 2007 … I first reported Faulk's story on May 19, 2008. He contacted me because he had read the story I'd written about Kinne.”
Swanson’s report from two years ago about Kinne’s allegations also raises questions about the objectivity and politics of Kinne’s decision to “break whatever rules I may have just broken” to vent her allegations. Swanson reported that “she joined a tour of Vermont with activists Cindy Sheehan, John Nichols, Dan DeWalt, and [Iraq Veterans Against the War], a tour promoting the passage of impeachment resolutions in Vermont towns …”
That Kinne and Faulk’s complaints were voiced some years ago seems to be borne out by the Washington Post, which reported that, "while declining to give specifics, an NSA spokesman said some of the allegations were currently under investigation, while others had [already] been 'found to be unsubstantiated.'" The Post also reported that a "US intelligence official familiar with the reports noted that two internal investigations, by the inspectors general of the NSA and the Army, were unable to substantiate the allegations."
Furthermore, Swanson noted that at least one lawmaker, Vermont’s Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, which has oversight over FISA and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, expressed little interest in Kinne’s allegations two years ago. In the wake of ABC’s report, however, Leahy reputedly has suddenly become concerned about the allegations, and whether FISA was violated.
Meanwhile, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-WV, called the allegations “extremely disturbing” and declared that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence he chairs will investigate.
Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-TX, also said the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that he chairs may also investigate the pairs’ allegations.
There’s little doubt that there will be a flurry of highly publicized hearings and that the respective committee’s will summon the nation’s highest ranking intelligence officials to answer contentious questioning from the panels’ members. What will likely be much less clear though is whether the interception of communications from within a war zone (especially sat-phones) were, and are, illegal.
What’s most likely to emerge out of all the Hill hoopla over this is that some SIGINT collectors and their supervisors who may have indeed played fast and loose with transcripts of tawdry phone sex for their own vicarious thrills will be reprimanded, perhaps even charged with criminal violation of the secrecy oaths they signed.U.S. investigation finds fraud in H-1B visa applications
WASHINGTON — A federal investigation has found significant problems in a controversial program granting temporary visas to skilled foreign workers.
The study by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, an agency of the Department of Homeland Security, found intentional fraud or technical violations in almost 21 percent of the applications for H-1B visas they reviewed.
The findings, completed last month, give new ammunition to advocacy groups that say the program lets U.S. companies bypass American workers in favor of lower-paid foreigners. Large businesses, particularly technology companies, say H-1B visas are an important way to staff specialized positions.
Both sides and members of Congress agree, however, that the government needs to provide more oversight.
"The American people trust that this program is limited to workers whose special qualifications are necessary to sustain a growing economy," said Rep. Lamar Smith, R-San Antonio . "We cannot allow individuals to abuse H-1B visas in order to enter the country fraudulently and take jobs from American workers."
To obtain H-1B status, foreign workers must be sponsored by an American company that agrees to employ them in a specific task for the entire three-year duration of the visa.
But the study, which randomly reviewed 246 applications submitted from October 2005 to March 2006, found visa holders using fraudulent documents, being sponsored by nonexistent companies or working in unrelated fields. One company admitted that a "business development analyst" would be repairing washing machines at a laundromat.
Agency spokeswoman Chris Rhatigan said Citizenship and Immigration Services is considering other protections, such as regular site visits, to ensure that sponsoring businesses actually exist or that employees are working in accordance with their applications.
She said it is also looking to use more of its funds to investigate fraud. Each sponsoring company already pays a $500 anti-fraud fee for each visa they obtain.
Although H-1Bs make up only about 1 percent of all non-immigrant visas issued by the government, they have been a lightning rod in the debate over how globalization affects U.S. jobs.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican and a critic of the program, made the agency's report public this month to boost his case that American workers are being harmed.
"The results of this report validate exactly what I've been fearful of: Some employers are bringing H-1B visa holders into our country with complete disregard for the law," he said in a statement.
He also emphasized his "immense frustration" with the three-year time frame needed to complete the study.
Programmers Guild President Kim Berry said he was just as concerned about legitimate H-1B visas as he was about fraudulent ones.
"All of those are displacing Americans, whether there is fraud involved or not," he said.
Berry said businesses should be required to make more efforts to hire Americans before looking abroad.
Kelly Hunt, senior manager for immigration policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce , dismissed the notion that American workers were being displaced, saying not all tech jobs require the same skills.
"A lot of times, you may see a decline in certain types of jobs," she said. "But there's a big difference between a person that does material sciences and a person that does electrical engineering."
Hunt said the government should remove the 65,000-person annual limit on H-1B visas in favor of a cap that fluctuates with market demands. An additional 20,000 visas are available for foreign graduates of U.S. universities.
Federal officials reported a record number of applications this year, receiving 163,000 in five days.
Robert Hoffman, vice president for government and public affairs at technology company Oracle Corp. , said additional oversight is necessary to ensure the program isn't ruined for law-abiding companies.
He said Oracle was prepared to hire 1,000 foreign workers last year but only obtained 100 H-1B visas.
"Either we hire them to work offshore or they work for our competitors," he said.
Researchers Find Problems with RFID Passport Cards
| by New York Times | |
| | |
| RFID tags used in two new types of border-crossing documents in the United States are vulnerable to snooping and copying, a researcher said on Thursday. US Passport Cards issued by the US Department of State and EDLs (enhanced driver's licenses) from the state of Washington contain RFID (radio-frequency identification) tags that can be scanned at border crossings without being handed over to agents. Both were introduced earlier this year for border crossings by land and water only, and can't be used for air travel. New York is the only other US state with an EDL, though others are in the works. |
Where is Obama’s Birth Certificate and Why Doesn’t He Produce It?
Frankly, I didn't think finding my mother's birth certificate was possible, given the fact that she had been born in a farmhouse in Storrs, CT, along with nine of her 10 siblings, to parents who didn't speak English. Despairing that she would never be "qualified" to receive the care she desperately needed, I set about to find the document, which I was sure had vanished in the unreliable record-keeping of 1913.
First I called an official in Hartford, the capitol of Connecticut, who recommended that I call the Storrs record-keeping office.
That took two minutes.
Next I called the Storrs office and was told to call another number.
That took two minutes.
When I called the third number, I explained to the woman who answered the phone that I was "asking something impossible." I gave her my mother's first name and her father's last name.
Within four minutes, she said, "Here it is!" She had found my mother's birth certificate, and it surprised me when I learned my mother's "real" first name and "real" last name had changed significantly as she and her family became Americanized.
When I expressed my amazement, the woman said: "That's nothing...we're routinely asked to find birth certificates from the 1800s, and we do that all the time!"
Total time it took me to find my mother's 1913, born-in-a-farmhouse birth certificate: 10 minutes.
WHERE IS OBAMA'S?
To this date, Barack Obama has refused - or been unable - to produce an authentic birth certificate that attests to the fact he is eligible to run for office. He has had more than the two-years of campaigning for the presidency of the United States to do this, but failed.
Why is this important? Because the Constitution of the United States expressly forbids anyone born on foreign soil to run for the highest office in our land.
You would think that Obama would have volunteered the "proof" of his eligibility within a nanosecond of entering the race. But here we are, less than two weeks away from the election, and Americans still don't know if Obama is an American!
While Obama's camp submitted a supposedly authentic birth certificate to the far-left blog Daily Kos, it was found to have been a photo-shopped version of the birth certificate of his half-sister, who was actually born in Hawaii, as Obama claims he was.
While this glaring omission in Obama's eligibility to become the most powerful man on earth mystified some and rankled others, a few people - clearly alarmed at what they considered a stealth candidate's attempt to dance his way around the Constitution and venture into the realm of criminality - took action.
SLEUTH #1
The first sleuth was lawyer Philip J. Berg, a Democrat from Pennsylvania and an undisguised Hillary fan. Last August, Berg - a former deputy attorney general of Pennsylvania and one-time candidate for both governor and senator - filed a lawsuit in Federal Court (Berg v. Obama, Civil Action No. 08-cv-4083) seeking a Declaratory Judgment and an Injunction against Obama, alleging that the first-term Illinois senator did not meet the qualifications to be President of the United States.
Berg's suit was based on Obama's failure to answer satisfactorily the question of where he was born. Was it in Hawaii, Kenya, or Indonesia? Was his legal name Barack Hussein Obama, Barry Soetoro (his stepfather's surname), Barry Obama, Barack Dunham (his maternal grandparents' surname), or Barry Dunham?
Among the other questions Berg raised were the authenticity of the name Obama used on his Illinois Bar Application and his possible allegiance to other countries.
Details of the case, including direct quotations, are found on Berg's website: http://www.obamacrimes.com/ .
"Voters donated money, goods and services to elect a nominee and were defrauded by Senator Obama's lies and obfuscations," Berg said. "He clearly shows a conscience of guilt by his actions in using the forged birth certificate and the lies he's told to cover his loss of citizenship. We believe he...supported this belief by his actions in hiding his secret, in that he failed to regain his citizenship and used documents to further his position as a natural born citizen...His very acts prove he knew he was no longer a natural born citizen. We believe he knew he was defrauding the country or else why use the forged birth certificate of his half sister?...If the DNC officers and/or leaders had performed one ounce of due diligence, we would not find ourselves in this emergency predicament...from making a person the nominee who has lost their citizenship as a child and failed to even perform the basic steps of regaining citizenship through an oath of allegiance at age eighteen [18] as prescribed by Constitutional laws."
The net result of Berg's efforts was that, on September 9, both Obama and the Democratic National Committee filed a joint motion for a Protective Order to Stay Discovery pending a decision on the Motion to Dismiss his lawsuit. In other words, to make Berg's lawsuit go away!
Berg said he was "outraged, as this is another attempt to hide the truth from the public; it is obvious that documents do not exist to prove that Obama is qualified to be President." The joint motion, Berg asserted, was a concerted effort to avoid the truth by attempting to delay the judicial process, although legal, by not resolving the issue presented: that is, whether Barack Obama meets the qualifications to be President. He said it is obvious that Obama was born in Kenya and does not meet the qualifications to be President of the United States. Simply stated, Obama "is unable to produce a certified copy of his Birth Certificate from Hawaii because it does not exist."
An e-mail friend of mine, a lawyer, stated: "What has boggled my mind about this case is that Berg simply waited for a court order to compel the production of the birth certificate, when he could just as easily have served a subpoena on the Hawaii County Clerk or County Recorder - or whoever is the custodian of records in Hawaii - to produce the original birth certificate for examination by an expert forensic-document examiner to produce certified copies to the Court, the Plaintiff, and the Defendants, which would have shifted the burden to Obama to quash the subpoena - and if he filed a motion to quash the subpoena to produce his own birth certificate, that would sure as hell tell us that he has a lot to hide."
SLEUTH #2
Also in August, longtime Obama nemesis Andy Martin - a Chicago journalist, lawyer, author of the bestseller, "Obama: The Man Behind The Mask," and executive editor or http://www.contrariancommentary.com/ - filed a suit in the Court of the First Circuit State of Hawaii (08-1-2147-10) against the Republican governor, Linda Lingle, and the director of the Department of Health, Dr. Chiyome Fukino.
Martin's suit alleged that the defendants had refused to provide a copy of the requested, certified copy of the birth certificate of Senator Obama "attested to by the State and not a `certificate' which is posted on a website and which has been debunked as possibly having been altered."
"It is axiomatic," Martin's suit said, "that the birth certificate of a presidential candidate is a document of crucial public concern and significance."
Failing both his petition and an initial "emergency motion," Martin filed his second emergency motion this month (-1-2147-10 BIA) "for an Order to Show Cause (`OSC') directing the defendants...on or before October 22, 2008...at a hearing before this Court why the relief requested by the Plaintiff should not be granted...This lawsuit does not involve complicated or disputed facts."
"Why is Barack Obama obstructing access to his birth records?" Martin asks. "Along with his obstructing access to college records and other essential information about his past? I want to see a certified copy issued by the State of Hawaii, not one issued by the State of Obama... Interestingly, we think we also know now why he has virtually imprisoned his white grandmother and refuses to allow her to appear in public?"
Numerous conservative journalists, talking heads and bloggers have addressed Obama's fitness to be president, questioning his:
* Reed-thin résumé.
* Stunning lack of concrete legislative accomplishments (both in the Illinois legislature and the U.S. Senate).
* Long-time close relationships and associations with Marxists and anti-American militants like Frank Marshall, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Phleger, Khalid Rashidi, et al.
* Failure to provide transcripts of his years at Occidental College, Columbia University, and Harvard Law School.
* Failure to provide any more than a one-page "report" from his medical doctor about his health status.
* Rationale for flip-flopping on every major issue - economic policy, domestic policy, foreign policy, et al - during this campaign.
The sleuthing continues. According to Berg, Martin, and a number of other sources, Obama was really born in the Coast Provincial General Hospital at Mombassa, Kenya at 7.24 PM on August 4, 1961, a birth that was documented by a certificate with an embossed seal that displays the name of the hospital, as well as witness signatures. In addition, if these reports are accurate, his grandmother in Kenya, as well as his brother and sister, claim they were present during Obama's birth in Kenya.
GRAMMY DEAREST
Now - belatedly - that the net is closing in on Obama, and the suspicions, as many have alleged, are that he is a Trojan Horse for Islamic interests, or a Manchurian Candidate, or a total fraud - Obama has seemingly discovered an interest in his ailing grandmother. Yes, that Grammy who he so facilely threw under the bus during the early days of his campaign.
He is now so worried about Grandma Dunham - the woman who raised him but strangely didn't attend his nomination - that he is taking a few days off from his intense campaign to visit this ailing widow.
Or could his strangely-timed trip to Hawaii really be to "clear up" the sticky case of his missing birth certificate?
I live in New York, where it is not uncommon for BIG payoffs to influence people to come up with "the goods." A half-a-million here, a dire threat there, often influence people to do things - like perjure themselves, produce phony documents, et al - that they would never do under less "pressured" circumstances.
If the magic document doesn't appear, it is possible, and entirely legal, that Obama could be removed from the ballots in states that are questioning his eligibility.
According to a recent article in The Daily Herald in Everett, WA, a civil action was filed in Washington State Superior Court against Sam Reed, Secretary of State, demanding that Illinois Sen. Barack Obama be removed from the ballot in Washington unless he can provide verification of his status as a United States citizen. The citizen who filed the suit, Steven Marquis, asked that Reed verify - by looking at "original or certified verifiable official documents" - that Obama is a natural-born citizen of the United States and eligible to serve as president, and that the office do so by Election Day.
Like others investigating the matter, Marquis said that answering the unanswered questions about Obama's eligibility and background would "preclude a constitutional crisis and likely civil unrest" that would arise if information about Obama's ineligibility came to light after the election.
EXPLOSIVE PRESS RELEASE
This week, on October 21, 2008, Mr. Berg released the result of his investigation. In a startling press release, he has announced that "Obama & DNC admit all allegations in Berg v. Obama." In his release, Berg explained that "by way of failure to timely respond to Requests for Admissions...the DNC `ADMITTED' that Obama is "NOT QUALIFIED" to be President and therefore Obama must immediately withdraw his candidacy for President and the DNC shall substitute a qualified candidate."
Berg stated that he filed Requests for Admissions on September 15, 2008 with a response by way of answer or objection had to be served within thirty [30] days. No response to the Requests for Admissions was served by way of response or objection. Thus, all of the Admissions directed to Obama and the DNC are deemed "ADMITTED." Therefore, Obama must immediately withdraw his candidacy for President.
According to Berg, Obama - by default - admitted to every charge the lawyer made, among them:
1. I was born in Kenya.
2. I am a Kenya "natural born" citizen.
3. My foreign birth was registered in the State of Hawaii.
4. My father, Barrack Hussein Obama, Sr. admitted Paternity of me.
5. My mother gave birth to me in Mombosa, Kenya.
The DNC's admissions, which number 27, include that:For the entire list, go to: http://www.obamacrimes.com/
1. They nominated Barack Hussein Obama as the Democratic Nominee for President.
2. They have not vetted Barack Hussein Obama.
3. They did not have a background check performed on Barack Hussein Obama.
4. They did not verify Barack Hussein Obama's eligibility to serve as President of the United States.
5. Barack Hussein Obama was born in Kenya.
WHAT HAPPENS NOW?
Interest in this case is understandably intense. Berg's website has already received over 55 million hits. But predictably, the overwhelmingly liberal media has yet to pick up on this story, as if ignoring a story that has profound implications for our Republic and for the potential of a Constitutional crisis is less important than discussing Sarah Palin's wardrobe.
It's possible that all the states that are working on obtaining Obama's birth certificate will simultaneously remove him from the ballot at one time. It's also possible that, failing to produce the birth certificate, Obama will voluntarily step aside, leaving a breach through which Hillary will walk.
Meanwhile, as legal challenges proceed at warp speed, and Obama's lawyers scramble to avoid the Scandal of the Century, one thing remains intractably the same: Obama still has not produced proof of his eligibility to run for office.
The Senate's Bankers
Politically directed credit – again.
You might think lawmakers would have had enough of politically directed credit after the $200 billion fiasco of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But you'd be wrong.
On Wednesday, Senators Chuck Schumer (D., Fannie), Jack Reed (D., Freddie) and Robert Menendez (D., N.J.) called on the Treasury to set "lending goals" for banks receiving capital injections under Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's rescue plan. The press release issued by Senator Schumer's office complained that banks receiving public capital "may not fulfill the main goal of the Treasury program, which was to increase lending activities in order to unfreeze the credit markets." Instead, these Senators said, the banks might choose to "hoard" the cash.
"Banks must understand that these funds aren't a gift," Senator Menendez warned, ominously. And here we thought that "not a gift" was covered in the part of the plan that requires the banks to pay interest on the capital to taxpayers on a preferred basis over private shareholders.
Note to Senator Schumer, et al.: Banks don't make money by "hoarding" it, or "stuffing it under mattresses," in the New York Democrat's words. They make money by lending. But lending has been constrained in part because losses on past lending and investment have left the banks short of capital. If a bank should decide that keeping that capital unfettered is better than going bankrupt, for example, that should not be taken as evidence of greed or a lack of public spiritedness. Nor would compelling banks to make loans ensure that "taxpayers are protected," as Senator Reed claimed. In fact, the opposite could be true, depending on the magnitude of potential losses from loans already on the books and the quality of the new loans.
Naturally, the Senators claim merely to want the banks to engage in responsible lending. Their letter includes disclaimers about not using "this capital to do the types of inappropriate lending or leverage with the exotic instruments that fueled this crisis." Of course! If only Citigroup had thought of that sooner: No Inappropriate Lending.
After more than a year of losses on mortgage investments, declining home prices and credit-market turmoil, the banks are busy rebuilding their balance sheets. More banks are likely to fail before this thing is over, and some of them will likely have received money from the Treasury along the way. The first priority for banks has to be to build up their capital base and dispose of dodgy assets so taxpayers don't take those losses.
What the banks need from each other is confidence that their balance sheets are sound. Calling on them to return to pre-crisis levels of lending, as the Senators do, has exactly the opposite effect: It increases the odds that they will take on business to please political masters, not because they can afford to do so.
Now that Treasury is buying bank stakes, the danger is that every politician in the Beltway will want a special dividend payable to him. This is one more reason for the Treasury, in this Administration or the next, to appoint someone to run this program who cannot be bullied. Mr. Paulson is still asleep at that switch. The Senators' letter is another reminder, if one were needed, that the sooner the feds get out of the banking business, the better for the banks, the economy and the country.
Eyeing Obama Administration, Defense Sec'y stops talking about "Islamist" terrorism
Hoping President Obama might let him keep his job, Gates toes the PC line and opts to ignore the one single explanation of their own motives and goals that the terrorists have offered to us.
"As Obama era looms, Gates drops 'Islamist' from characterization of terrorism," from the World Tribune, October 24 (thanks to Rosanne):
Defense Secretary Robert Gates last week referred to Islamist terrorism by the politically-correct term “violent extremism” during a speech to the U.S. Institute of Peace. The use of the non-Islamist terminology highlights the ongoing debate in government over the use of terms like jihad and Islamic extremism in public discussions of terrorism.Gates said Oct. 15 that “in violent extremism, we face an adversary today that seeks to eject all Westerners and Western influence from the Middle East and Southwest Asia, to destroy Israel and overthrow all secular and Western-oriented governments in the region.”
In a second reference, he said “the long reach of violent extremism emanating from failed and failing states, from ungoverned spaces brought terror to America's shores and subsequently brought America and our allies to Afghanistan.”
The State Department and Department of Homeland Security recently issued guidelines for U.S. government officials that said American Muslim groups had recommended not using “jihad” or Islamic extremism in labeling Muslim extremist violence in order not to offend Muslims.
A U.S. Central Command Red Team of experts however, stated in a recent report that honest reports require labeling the terrorists as Islamic and jihadist since the roots of the violence lie in Islamic law. The controversial report called for “freedom of speech in jihad analysis” and sought to debunk the State and DHS reports claiming that the use of Islamic terms in describing terrorists was offensive speech and was opposed by some U.S. Muslim groups.
Several Democrats in recent weeks have said Gates should stay on if Barack Obama wins the presidential election, an appeal that has not been rejected by Gates, according to a Pentagon spokesman.
The Depraved World of Jihadi Child Porn
Besides their well-known penchant for anti-Semitism, misogyny and nihilistic violence, Muslim extremists are also gaining a disturbing reputation among British security agencies as collectors of child pornography.
According to a report on The Times website last week, police in Great Britain are discovering that their investigations into Muslim terrorism are leading them into the depraved world of child sexual exploitation. The reverse is also occurring with child protection officers encountering people who are “preparing to carry out terrorist acts.”
At one time, the link between the two deviant behaviours was considered so strong that security officials considered establishing an anti-terrorism project involving child welfare experts, but never followed through because Scotland Yard’s hands were too full with other terrorist investigations.
But demand is growing in Great Britain for the setting up of such a task force that could help security agencies understand the terrorist mindset and prevent future attacks.
“This is an important development,” said Labor MP Andrew Dinsmore. “We have to do more than just police work. It needs child protection, criminological and psychological work. It could become a very important weapon in the fight against terrorism.”
Police say they are already noticing a similarity in methods Muslim terrorists and paedophiles use in manipulating and grooming young people for their corrupt purposes. This usually involves introducing them to their deviant behaviour and then convincing them over time that it is normal.
British security personnel first became aware of a connection between Muslim extremism and child pornography in 2006. When investigating the terrorist connections of an east end London mosque preacher, Abdul Makim Khalisadar, a former primary school assistant, the 26-year-old’s DNA was found to match that of an unsolved rape case of a woman. Upon his arrest, police discovered Khalisadar also had a large amount of hardcore child pornography material on his computer.
In the same year, police made a similar discovery after raiding a suspected Muslim terrorist’s home, looking for a chemical bomb. While no explosive device was found, police did discover 44 “indecent” pictures of children on the 23-year-old man’s home computer and cell phone. Child porn, The Times reports, has been found “during investigations into some of the most advanced suspected plots.”
European security officials first discovered child porn images in a Muslim extremist’s possession when they raided a mosque in Milan, Italy, in 2001. Embedded in the disturbing images, though, they found hidden messages sent by fellow Islamists, causing Italian security agents to believe the terrorists were copying a clandestine method paedophiles use in communicating with one another. At that time, police believed this form of communications camouflage (called steganography) accounted for the child porn’s presence in the mosque.
But other, less doubtful, cases have cropped up since then. When arrested, Abdelkader Ayachine, a suspected Muslim terrorist currently awaiting trial in Spain, possessed almost 40,000 child pornographic movies and images, a number far exceeding any need for encoded communications. Ayachine was connected to the Casablanca bombing terrorist group that killed 45 people in 2003 and stands accused in the Spanish court of inciting jihad and recruiting fighters for the Iraq war. Prosecutors say his child pornography collection consisted mainly of “minors having sex, among themselves and with adults.”
Muslim extremists’ attraction to child pornography has been attributed to cultural factors. An Italian magistrate involved in the Milan mosque case said possession of child porn by Islamists did not necessarily indicate paedophilic tendencies, but rather was the result of cultural differences. Girls, he stated, often become wives in the Muslim world at age 11 and 12.
The Islamists’ interest in boys as sex objects is generally owed to their beliefs and social milieu. Their strict religious convictions do not allow them to be with a woman outside their own families, let alone touch one, before marriage. Moreover, in some Muslim countries, males can’t even catch a glimpse of the demonized female form because of the body-encompassing clothing she is forced to wear. In such a gender segregated environment, homosexual behavior develops, especially towards boys.
Even the Taliban, which executed homosexuals when it ruled Afghanistan, could not eradicate the sexploitation of boys, even in its own ranks. Among the 30 commands it issued to its fighters, Rule No. 19 forbid them from taking young boys without facial hair into their barracks. After the Taliban regime fell, a Fox news report indicated pederasty in Afghanistan returned to its previous place as an accepted social norm.
Sexual exploitation of boys in Muslim countries also has a long history. The Asia Times columnist, Spengler (an anonymous pseudonym), wrote in his column, Sufism, Sodomy and Satan, that, in the High Middle Ages, Sufism, Islam’s mystic branch, “is the only case in which a mainstream current of a major world religion preached pederasty as a path to spiritual enlightenment.” He then cites a German historian who claims this Sufi practice “persisted in many Islamic countries until very recent times.” The 2007 movie, The Kite Runner, located in Afghanistan, showed a “last vestige” of Sufism’s pederast side when dancing boys appeared in female dress.
Perhpas not altogether insignificant in this grotesque phenomenon is that the Koran itself promises to put pre-pubescent boys at the service of jihadi martyrs not interested in the female virgins awaiting them in paradise. The boys will be like “scattered pearls” of “perpetual freshness” (Suras 52:24, 56:17, 76:19).
The consequences of Islamist misogyny, gender segregation and sexual abuse of Muslim boys are far-reaching. Besides growing up to be sexual deviants who collect child pornography and may victimize other children, such sexually traumatized Muslim boys are predisposed to become involved in terrorism as a way of expressing their sexual rage. It therefore comes as no surprise that one anti-terror source told the Times: “A way of finding who the extremists and terrorists are is to go through the child porn sites.”
Stephen Brown is a contributing editor at Frontpagemag.com. He has a graduate degree in Russian and Eastern European history.
Washington Is the Problem
By STEPHEN MOORE - Wall Street Journal On-line
Fred Smith is in an agitated state. He's just returned from a Washington Redskins game -- played in FedEx field in Washington -- and the team has been upset by the St. Louis Rams. "It was just awful," he grouses. "My son's one of the coaches, and he was ready to jump off the ledge of the stadium."
There are few better people to ask about our current economic precipice than Mr. Smith -- or, as some people call him, "Fred Ex." His company has $38 billion in sales, employs four football stadiums full of workers, owns 300 jet airplanes, and tens of thousands of trucks and vehicles. FedEx moves an incomprehensible seven million packages each day to every corner of the globe. And the good news is that Fred is optimistic -- sort of.
![[The Weekend Interview]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/ED-AI426_winter_DV_20081022184329.jpg)
Ismael Roldan"Oh, the country is going to get through this and the financial markets will stabilize," he assures me, but only after we go through a period of "trauma and readjustment."
I ask him just what he means by "trauma." He attributes the financial crisis to "the intersection of four long-term developments." Reckless mortgage lending policies; high energy prices; mark-to-market accounting rules; and national policies that favor what he calls "the financial sector over the industrial sector."
"Rather than in our business where you have to have a dollar of equity for, 10 cents or 15 cents of debt," he explains, "it's exactly the opposite in the financial sector where you have one dollar of equity for 10, 25, 50 times risk." "Things became so flipped upside down," he explains, that "the assets at these banks became the liabilities and the liabilities became the assets. These people were making these fantastic returns -- at places like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- but in reality they weren't adding a lot of value. I have said time and again that there is a fundamental tendency in good times in the financial sector to over-leverage. Our national policies actively encouraged all this debt."
How so? "The United States has a completely uncompetitive tax structure in general and it has a particularly onerous tax structure for firms that are asset-intensive. If you run an industrial company like FedEx, which employs 290,000 folks, most of whom are blue-collar people, the way we have to run this business is to equip those workers with billions of dollars of assets that allow them to pick up and deliver millions of things around the world."
His theory is that the tax bias against capital explains why so much top U.S. talent got whisked off to become investment bankers. "Not too many young people coming out of school are studying to be production managers at General Motors." He says that most of FedEx's first line managers come not from the top flight universities, but out of community colleges and the military. "The top talent has wanted to go to Wall Street."
He has come to hold the get-rich-quick Wall Street financiers in more than a little disdain. He views the heroes of the U.S. economy as the companies that actually produce real goods and services. He sees the Wall Street collapse as an inevitable byproduct of investment bankers building multitrillion dollar debt pyramid structures.
So how do we fix this problem and retool our industrial sector in a pro-competitive fashion? "We've got to reduce the taxes on equity. Let companies expense their capital purchases."
He uses an example from FedEx. "Look, our capital budget as we went into this year was about $3 billion. We went out to Boeing in July for our board meeting to see the new triple seven, [the Boeing 777] which we have bought. If we had a lower corporate tax rate with the ability to expense capital expenditures, guess what? We'd buy more triple sevens. We absolutely have to cut the corporate tax. Our current tax rate is about 38%. Even Germany has a 25% rate."
We turn to the election. Mr. Smith is one of the most enthusiastic supporters of John McCain among the Fortune 50 CEOs. When I ask why, he says instantly: "Because I agree with him on trade, taxes, energy and health care."
Next I ask Mr. Smith about the class warfare theme of the political debate. "The politicians deplore the fact that we have a disparity of income," he says, but "the only way to make a blue-collar person earn more is to invest in capital, training and infrastructure. So the more you tax capital, the more you hurt workers." He estimates that about 70% of the return from FedEx capital expenditures is captured by workers in the form of higher wages as their productivity rises.
He sees a big problem in that so few Americans now pay any income tax. "We're now at a point where a very large part of the population pays no federal income tax at all. When you have a majority of the population that realizes that you can transfer money from the productive to themselves, that's one of the great questions for the future of civilization, as far as I'm concerned."
As for CEO pay, Mr. Smith concedes that in some cases corporate management pay scales have gotten far out of line with shareholder interests. But he is quick to add: "I don't think anybody begrudges somebody making a large amount of money as long as it benefits everyone else. The problem is when they make a large amount of money and the shareholders get clobbered." As he sees it, "There's only one solution, and that is for a competent board of directors to oversee managers and give them incentives which are long-term in nature and which are irrevocably tied to the fortunes of the shareholders."
I tour the FedEx command and control center outside the Memphis airport. It's an awesome sight. FedEx operates its own air traffic control system and its own weather monitoring services. It takes over whole airports at night, and it operates its own risk mitigation operation to prepare for every possible contingency. "We have to know instantly how we reroute our planes if that storm in Tulsa turns into a tornado," the operations manager explains. There's a massive screen covering an entire wall that monitors the location and progress of every FedEx plane in the sky.
The computer technicians show me a jaw-dropping display on the computer screen of a fast-motion day of FedEx plane travel. Starting in the wee hours of the morning, the planes descend from all over the country into the Memphis airport. A few hours later, after being loaded with packages, the jets begin their assault on the major cities of the nation and world. They call this the "ant farm," because it resembles armies of ants scurrying to every corner of the globe. This is a company that has staked its entire reputation on getting packages to their appointed destination, "absolutely, positively overnight."
I keep thinking how many tens of billions of dollars Uncle Sam would save if it were one-third this efficient. These are the people that should have been in charge of the rescue operation during Hurricane Katrina. "We got all our people out -- no problem," Mr. Smith tells me.
Considering FedEx's world-wide operations, and its rapid expansion in China, it occurs to me that there is perhaps no other company in the world more dependent on international trade. Sure enough, Fred Smith is a fanatical supporter of free trade. So much so that he says, "I think the best thing the United States could do is to unilaterally disarm. It should open up markets. The agricultural subsidies are terrible. They're just immoral."
On economic grounds, he continues, "I think the history is very clear, that trade is the main reason that the world has enjoyed the prosperity. Look at China. They've drug hundreds of millions of people out of poverty through trade."
Trade aside, no issue is of greater consequence to FedEx than energy policy. FedEx consumes 1.3 billion gallons of jet fuel a year, and is the largest user of energy in the world next to the U.S. military. Mr. Smith sits on the board of the Energy Security Leadership Council, which issued a report a few months ago advocating a huge expansion of domestic energy supply. How do we do this?
"Two things," he insists. "The first is we should maximize oil production in the United States in every respect. Everything, offshore, Alaska, shale, nonconventional, coal to liquid, gas to liquid, and nuclear. Let the market work.
"Second, and this is where I am an apostate on the free market, and also where I disagree in the main with, with Boone Pickens," Mr. Smith adds. "The United States has only one real way to reduce our dependence on foreign petroleum, in terms of reducing demand while we're increasing our domestic supply, and that is to electrify the short haul transportation system, to go to battery powered cars. The technology that brought us laptops and cell phones has reached a point where these lithium ion batteries can now produce cars like the Chevy Volt and the new plug-in Toyota Prius." Many FedEx trucks are already using this technology, though he admits they aren't yet cost efficient but are 42% more fuel efficient.
Mr. Smith ends our interview with a little sermon about what the U.S. must do to retain its global economic superpower status. "Many of our current policies are not conducive to continued economic leadership. We restrict immigration when we have thousands of highly educated people that want to come to the United States, and some of our greatest corporations [are] crying out that we don't have the scientific talent that we need to develop the next generation of innovations and inventions . . .
"That's where all wealth comes from . . . It's not from the government. It's from invention and entrepreneurship and innovation. And our policies promote a legal and regulatory system which impedes our ability to grow entrepreneurship. Lastly, if we want to make [America's workers] wealthier we have to quit demonizing quote, big corporations."
As I walk out the door I ask Mr. Smith if he's communicated these ideas directly to Barack Obama. "I haven't met Barack Obama," he replies. "He's certainly a charismatic fellow and well-spoken. I just disagree with him on trade and taxes and energy and health care."
Note: Smith is a former Marine Corps officer and
School lessons on terrorism rubbished
GOVERNMENT plans for teachers to educate children about terrorism have been rubbished by a senior North Somerset councilor.
Teachers now have access to new guidance on how to spot children who are 'vulnerable' to extremism.
Secretary of state for Children, Schools and Families, Ed Balls, says that schools have a 'key role' to play in getting youngsters to reject unsavoury views.
He introduced the Learning Together to be Safe booklet to encourage teachers to:
*Raise awareness of the threat from violent extremist groups.
*Provide information about its causes.
*Protect the wellbeing of particular pupils or groups who may be vulnerable to being drawn into violent extremist activity.
However, the unitary authority's member for children and young people, Cllr Jeremy Blatchford, says that counter extremism should be left to the experts.
Cllr Blatchford said: "It is a very dangerous thing for a people who are not members of the security and intelligence services to deal with.
"I think that it should be left to the professionals."
But the guidance has received backing from the National Union of Teachers.
Acting general secretary, Chritine Blowers, said: "Tiny, violent political groups can present a significant threat to large numbers of people.
"Terrorist threats have to be tackled. It's worth remembering that groups such as those from the far right can pose intimidatory threats to their communities, as serious as those from al-Qaeda.
"There is a very strong argument for providing the time and space in schools to enable teachers to work through the issues posed by determined individuals who are committed to recruiting young people to violent causes.
"No teacher will ignore obvious information about a specific, real threat, but it is vital that teachers are able to discuss with and listen to pupils, without feeling that they have to report every word."
Muslim's film warns about radical Islam
Jasser, who lives in Scottsdale and practices medicine in Phoenix, is the narrator of the documentary "The Third Jihad: Radical Islam's Vision for America," which opened in selected cities across the country Thursday. The film contends that there is more to jihad than acts of violence.
This is the "third jihad," according to the film. The first was when Muslim armies spread from Arabia throughout the Middle East, North Africa and Spain. The second jihad happened later, when Islamic armies toppled Constantinople and spread into Europe, India, and further into Africa.
Jasser, a regular worshipper at the Islamic Center of the Northeast Valley in Scottsdale, an ex-lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy and former physician to the U.S. Congress, urged viewers not to confuse the religion of Islam with political Islamism — a movement that he said seeks to establish governments ruled by Islamic law called Shariah. Countries that enforce Shariah are "human-rights disasters," he said.
The silent majority of Muslims are not radical and love the U.S., Jasser said.
"I'm also a Muslim and I've dedicated my life to fighting the threat of radical Islam," he said. Jasser and six other Scottsdale Muslims formed the nonprofit American Islamic Forum for Democracy in 2003 to foster an alternative school of thought to Islamism.
The Scottsdale film premiere at a Harkins theater attracted about 300 people, including Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., who serves on the Armed Forces and Judiciary committees. Franks said he believes Jasser is dedicated to the cause of human freedom and peace. "I have just the highest affection for (Jasser)," he said. "If there were just a few more of him, we'd have a chance of defeating this sooner."
The film opens with scenes from the 2004 massacre of schoolchildren in Beslan, Russia, by Chechen terrorists. Franks said he visited Beslan soon after the massacre.
"This film was, in my judgment, very accurate," he said. "Terrorism and the murder of innocents does not serve anyone on Earth and it does not serve any God that is real."
The Clarion Fund describes itself as a non-partisan organization aimed at educating Americans about national security issues, particularly about the threat of radical Islam. Lowder said the U.S. should start translating the books that established the foundation for American democracy by thinkers like Thomas Jefferson into Middle Eastern languages and putting them into the region, just as the Saudi government attempts to influence thought in the U.S.
Cleric in Iran issues fatwa against US-Iraqi pact
By ALI AKBAR DAREINI
An influential Iraqi cleric living in Iran on Wednesday issued a fatwa condemning a U.S.-Iraqi security pact that would keep American troops in Iraq for three more years and warned Iraqi leaders not to back the deal.
The Iranian-born Ayatollah Kazim al-Hosseini al-Haeri called the proposed agreement "haram" _ which in Arabic means forbidden by Islam _ and said that approving the deal would be "a sin God won't forgive."
Al-Haeri, based in the Iranian holy city of Qom, has Iraqi nationality and is believed to be a mentor of anti-U.S. Iraqi Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose followers oppose the deal. The fatwa, or religious decree, was posted on al-Haeri's Web site. ...
Islamic Radicals Shut Down Al Qaeda
October 23, 2008: Shia and Sunni radicals are attacking each other's web sites for the past six weeks. It began with a Shia attack on the two main web sites for Sunni radical religious propaganda (including al Qaeda) on September 11, 2008. Sunni hackers retaliated shortly thereafter by defacing 300 web sites belonging to Shia clergy and religious organizations. Shia hackers then came back with more attacks on Sunni clergy, media and religious sites. The two main Sunni radical propaganda sites, Al-Ekhlaas.net and Alhesbah.net, have been down most of the time since September 11.
Arab media and religious leaders have been pleading for the hackers to stop. Some have chastised the hackers for fighting fellow Moslems, rather than going after infidels (particularly Israel.) Moslem hackers don't like tangling with the Israelis, who have a much deeper bench in the hacking department.
This particular Cyber War seems to have attracted Arab and Iranian hackers who do not normally get involved in Islamic radicalism. The animosity between the Shia and Sunni sects goes back nearly a thousand years, and has led to much bloodshed in that time. While Sunni and Shia leaders try to play down this feud (over who should have inherited the leadership of Islam over a thousand years ago), grass roots hatred is tolerated. Thus lower ranking religious leaders in Iran and the Arab world spew hatred for each other's religious beliefs. This has little to do with the current plague of Sunni terrorism (al Qaeda and so on), but is more of a deep seated cultural dispute.
Western counter-terrorism organizations are sitting this one out.
European takes closer look at Islamic financing
PARIS: With commercial bank financing tight, Europeans have been taking a closer look at Islamic banking.
"The potential is there," Ahmad Jachi, the first deputy governor of the Central Bank of Lebanon, said at a conference this past week in Paris. "It's a matter of really enabling and creating the market."
Islamic banking has already been integrated into the British and German banking systems, and banking executives at the conference said efforts were under way to allow Muslims in France to bank and invest under regulations that conform to Shariah, the legal code of Islam.
Estimates of the Islamic banking market's current size vary from $500 billion to $1 trillion. It has only about 5 percent of the overall banking market, but attendees at the conference, which was sponsored by The Economist, said Islamic banking has a huge potential for growth, since one-sixth of the world's population is Muslim.
The International Monetary Fund estimates that the Islamic banking sector has grown 10 percent to 15 percent a year over the past decade.
There is no specific code to govern Islamic financing. Businesses that are trying to be compliant usually set up a board of Islamic scholars who study the investment structures and products and reassure investors or customers that their money is being held under Shariah guidelines. Mufti Abdul Kadir Barkatullah, an imam in Britain and a Shariah scholar who is regularly consulted by corporations, said Islamic banking regulations generally require investors to be "very prudent and careful with your money, and you only put your money to very good uses."
One general principle that has proved useful of late is that banks are not allowed to be heavily leveraged or to take too many risks.
The lender and the borrower share the risks and the rewards of a loan - which means loans can have no interest rates attached. Investments are also not allowed to profit from an enterprise involved with conventional finance, weapons, tobacco, gambling, pornography or alcohol.
But Haider Ala Hamoudi, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh Law School, said the differences between Islamic and Western-style banking were "more rhetoric than reality."
"It really is effectively the same thing economically," he said by telephone. "I think it's going to grow for some time," he added.
One company to benefit from Islamic banking is Velcan Energy, which has 200 employees, is based in Paris and develops hydropower plants in Brazil and India. Antoine Decitre, managing director at Velcan, said he was contacted by an Islamic bank, which he was not authorized to identify, that said it was interested in the company because it was environmentally friendly and its projects helped poor people in developing countries.
Velcan was able to get capital to execute its projects without having to wait for credit markets in the West to unfreeze, Decitre said. But the process has taken some time because the practices were new to Velcan. "There are many conflicting views about what you and cannot do," he said. "So take your time well in advance."
U.S. to target Taliban drug traffic
The strategy review comes as U.S. forces face increased violence in Afghanistan and reflects a growing consensus that drug trafficking has become essential to a Taliban resurgence. ....
Starving cattle amid high prices for feed in Neb.
BUTTE, Neb. (AP) - The dead were stacked in two piles, 70 cows in one, 30 in another, hidden away in the crevices of this scenic, hilly ranch country where cattle outnumber people.
Carl Schuman, a former county prosecutor who owned the cattle with his two brothers, says he knows what happened: They died "mostly of old age, and some younger ones got pneumonia."
But state investigators have another theory about what happened earlier this year on the Schuman ranch, where pastures this summer were nearly stripped bare from overgrazing while grass in adjoining pastures was about a foot high.
They think the animals might have starved to death.
Investigators haven't had to go out of their way to find dead cattle in Nebraska, where 6.5 million head roam. Since early this year, three cases of alleged starvation deaths involving a total of about 240 cattle have been reported in Nebraska - more than some officials can recall.
The state Attorney General has been investigating the Schuman ranch deaths since shortly after the piles were found March 15. No charges have been filed.
The latest case of alleged neglect surfaced earlier this month in southeastern Nebraska near Fairbury. Officials said they found many of the cows in a herd of about 80 near death at a defunct dairy farm.
The third case came in late April, when 25 cattle carcasses were found in a Merrick County pasture just outside of Grand Island. Ted Robb and Dustin Dugan pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of improper disposal of carcasses after felony animal neglect charges were dropped. They now face fines instead of jail time.
And in January, 111 cattle were found starved to death and another 140 emaciated in Red Willow County. Charges were never filed against the owner.
"Neglect cases are on the rise, and what's causing it, I'm not sure," said Steven Stanec, executive director of the Nebraska Brand Committee, a state agency that helps police the cattle industry. "We're having whole herds of hundreds of cattle being neglected."
Stanec and others say the cases from early this year don't share a clear-cut cause. But, he said, "I would say the higher price of feed has something to do with it."
In recent months the per-ton cost of hay has risen by about 80 percent, adding to the already high costs of other feed caused by lofty corn prices, which have slipped recently.
High commodity and fuel prices have encouraged farmers to stop raising hay, which is mostly used to feed cattle in the winter and early spring, said Neil Tietz, editor of Hay & Forage magazine. Tietz said hay prices are "certainly the highest I've ever seen."
And even with the recent drops in oil and commodity prices, Tietz expects hay prices to creep higher this coming winter, which could cause even more cases of starvation.
Livestock experts and those who track animal abuse cases nationally, including the Humane Society of the United States, say they don't know whether livestock neglect cases are on the rise across the country.
But they predict high hay prices will lead to more cattle herds slowly wasting away from starvation in remote pastures.
"We are going to have more cases of this," said Temple Grandin, professor of animal science at Colorado State University. She said starvation that can often take months to cause death is the worst type of animal abuse.
"There's no excuse for livestock starving to death," Grandin said angrily when told of the Nebraska cases. "You can always sell them. They might not be at a good price, but you can always sell them."
The cattle industry is already nursing a black eye following widespread circulation of videos recorded by undercover investigators for the Humane Society of the United States. They showed alleged abuse of livestock in slaughterhouses and sale barns, including a video from early this year of crippled and sick cows at a California slaughterhouse being shoved with forklifts.
In the Red Willow County case where 111 cattle were found starved to death, an investigator who went to the ranch described a grim, surreal scene. Some of the carcasses were frozen in a pond. The cattle had broken through the ice trying to get water.
An investigator who went to the ranch described a grim, surreal scene. Some of the carcasses were frozen in a pond. The cattle had broken through the ice trying to get water.
The owner had gone through a divorce, his tractor had broken down and "hay was too high and he couldn't afford to buy it," said David Horton, an inspector with the Nebraska Brand Committee.
"He just kinda gave up on life," Horton said.
The man wasn't charged with any crimes. Red Willow County Attorney Paul Wood said doing so would have cost too much because the county would have had to take custody of the remaining live cattle during court proceedings.
"We were going to have to take care of 140 head of cattle - feed, water and get vet care for them for a long time," Wood said. He estimated the cost at around $80,000.
"It was an unfortunate decision, but we made the best decision with the best interests of the live cattle," which the man sold, Wood said.
Similar decisions aren't uncommon in close-knit rural areas where it's "harder to throw the book" at offenders, said Dale Bartlett of the Humane Society of the United States.
Prosecution is also bypassed because livestock abuse doesn't cause the same level of public uproar as abuse to pets such as dogs, said Bartlett.
