US Special Ops are already in Syria

On March 7, I did a post, “Warmongers,” railing against three senators (John McCain, Joe Liberman, and Lindsey Graham) urging us to initiate military action against Syria in the name of human rights.

Silly me.

Turns out our military is already in Syria, in the form of Special Op Forces.

This is yet another war Nobel Peace Laureate Barack Obama got the United States in, at a time when:

• We are losing the war in Afghanistan, which is now America’s longest war;

• We can ill afford another war, with a national debt of more than $15 trillion, which now exceeds our GDP.

Bryant Jordan writes for Military.com, March 9, 2012, that according to a leaked Stratfor memo published by WikiLeaks, U.S. Special Operation Forces reportedly have been in Syria since December training groups to conduct guerrilla attacks and assassinations to bring down Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Stratfor is a Texas-based private intelligence-gathering company.

But Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. James Gregory said he could not comment on the memo’s authenticity, and that “due to the method” in which the memo was uncovered (by Wikileaks), it “seems to be pure conjecture.” He also said that DoD does not provide information on Special Operations deployments.

The claim of American Spec Ops Forces operating in Syria is made in an internal email dated Dec. 7, 2011, from an official at Stratfor. The writer — whose email reportedly belongs to the company’s director of analysis, Reva Bhalla — recounts a Pentagon meeting where officials “said without saying that SOF teams (presumably from US, UK, France, Jordan, Turkey) are already on the ground focused on recce [reconnaissance] missions and training opposition forces.” The idea ‘hypothetically’ is to commit guerrilla attacks, assassination campaigns, try to break the back of the Alawite forces, elicit collapse from within.  (Alawite is a minority branch of Islam to which the Assad family belongs.)

Last year during a breakfast meeting of the Association of the U.S. Army’s Land Warfare Institute, Maj. Gen. Kurt Fuller, deputy commanding general of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command, said that special operators have been in the Middle East since the “Arab Spring” started, but their mission was to keep volatile situations from getting worse:

“We also keep a close eye on and can’t ignore the other unstable regions in the world, and you’ve seen them in the mix here recently, too — Egypt, Lebanon, Algeria, Tunisia, Sudan. I can tell you that just about any place you see things happening on the news we’ve got Army Special Operations forces there, and they’re doing a variety of different things to hopefully prevent and deter these things from getting worse. I’m not going to tell you exactly where our people are or aren’t. I’ll say that if it’s important to this nation we’ve probably got guys there. They may not be there now but they’ve been there or they’re going.”

During a recent Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the Pentagon has begun early work drawing up “options” for a military campaign against Syria, but insisted that force should be the last option for ending the bloodshed and that the U.S. must not act alone. “We can do anything,” Dempsey said. “It’s not about ‘can we do it,’ It’s the question of ‘should we do it,’ and what are the opportunity costs elsewhere.”

~Eowyn

The Cat’s Out of the Bag: Every Province in China is Greece

Chinese Professor of Finance Says Regime is Bankrupt

Larry Lang, chair professor of Finance at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said in a lecture that he didn’t think was being recorded that the Chinese regime is in a serious economic crisis—on the brink of bankruptcy. In his memorable formulation: every province in China is Greece.  Full Article

Here is the link to professor Lang’s 4 hour talk that’s been posted to Youtube.  It’s in the Chinese language.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=comHcv7qSBg

America At the Precipice

In a letter to James Madison in 1786, George Washington wrote that ”No morn ever dawned more favorable than ours did; and no day was ever more clouded than the present! Wisdom, and good examples are necessary at this time to rescue the political machine from the impending storm.”

Those words are as true in 1786 as they are today.

We stand at the edge of a precipice and, whether or not we succeed in rescuing America from the abyss depends on what each of us — you and you and you and I — does.

The good news is that it appears that the American people finally recognize a very simple fact: Skippy is a commie!

A new Rasmussen Reports poll of 1,000 American adults found that a majority, 54%, believe Obama is more to the left than they are. (Another 26% don’t see much difference between their own ideology and his; and a lunatic fringe of 12% see Obama as more conservative than they are.)

But Obama — just like the communist party apparatchik of the former Soviet Union who preached socialism-communism but shopped in unmarked special stores for caviar and western blue jeans while the “proletarian” masses stood in long lines for milk and toothpaste — sure loves to surround himself with luxury.

For his reëlection campaign in the Midwestern cornbelt, Obama is traveling in a new luxury bus, with a $1.1 million pricetag. The bus had been purchased by the Secret Service, which means you and I and the other 53% of Americans who still pay income taxes. So what if America’s $16 trillion national debt now equals our GDP?

It’s an impenetrable-looking conveyance the size of a cross-country Greyhound, painted all in black, with dark tinted windows and flashing red and blue lights. To top it off, the bus was made in Canada!

And finally, by turning his back on Israel, Skippy is emboldening the Jew-haters in the Mid East.

Iran is itching to ignite the apocalypse. Iran’s chief military commander is ratcheting up the war rhetoric, warning Israel that its citizens should flee the Middle East or face annihilation, and threatening that “the heads of the Zionist government and Mr. Netanyahu should prepare themselves for the cage (prison).”

With so many awful people around the world, it is hard to choose  which one is the true Anti-Christ. So many candidates, so little time! But if that looney Mahmoud Ahmadinejad really fulfills his oft-stated promise to wipe Israel from the face of the Earth, we’ll know he’s the one.

~Siegfried & Eowyn

Battlecry, “Let Us Hunt Some Orc!”

August 2, 2011

We The Stupid

Ann Barnhardt

I stand here in abject stupefaction.  The so-called “right” or “Tea Party” in this republic is being so thoroughly rolled and defeated that I am struggling to come up with an adequate violent submission metaphor that does not involve prison rape . . . and they honesty think that they’re “winning.”                                                 Really?  You call this winning?

• - Obama gets over $2 Trillion to spend before the 2012 election
• - There are no real spending cuts
• - There is a massive tax increase effective January  1, 2013

Obama is going to be handed something in excess of $2 Trillion — and he has made it perfectly clear that he will spend every penny of it before the November 2012 election.  That’s why he kept saying, ” . . . so we don’t have to do this again”, meaning raise the debt ceiling again.  The debt ceiling would only need to be raised if all of the money had been spent.  Therefore, he has stated very clearly that he will spend every penny of any debt ceiling increase.  He is going to burn through $2 Trillion-plus in the next sixteen months.  This was the Obama regime’s plan from day one.  Geithner appeared before Congress in early May and told them this in no uncertain terms.  This outcome has been a known quantity all along.

There are no spending cuts in this plan.  It is all accounting fraud.  Saying that you are not going to spend money in Afghanistan ten years from now is not spending cuts.  Even if you accept the $1 Trillion in cuts over ten years propaganda, that is only $100 Billion per year, which is essentially meaningless relative to the size of the problem.  Furthermore, even a miniscule uptick in interest rates, which given the massive debasement of our currency is now a mathematical certainty, will completely consume that $100 Billion per year.  It’s all a joke.

Back to the $2 Trillion that Obama is being handed.  I honestly think that most people in this country have no understanding of simple counting numbers.  Do you not understand how much a trillion is?  Where do you think this money is going to come from — who has two trillion dollars to loan us?  China?  Nope.  Not even close.  China’s entire GDP is only $6 Trillion.  Do you honestly think that China is going to loan us one third of their total annual economic production?  China was a huge creditor to us back when $100 Billion was considered a staggeringly large amount of money – which was four years ago.  Now $100 Billion is literally a rounding error.  Do you realize that there are only a handful of nations of this planet that even have a GDP in excess of $2 Trillion?  If these countries loaned us every penny of their GDP, it wouldn’t even be $2 Trillion:

Canada ($1.57 T)
India ($1.54 T)
Russia ($1.46 T)

Are you starting to understand the scope of what we are talking about now?  Obama is going to embezzle considerably more than the entire economic output of Canada, India or Russia to his cronies before the 2012 election — and that is just counting this round of spending.  This doesn’t include the other $5 Trillion he has already burned through since 2009.

China is not going to lend us this money because they simply don’t have anything close to that much money to lend.  This $2 Trillion is going to come from the Federal Reserve.  Where is the Federal Reserve going to get $2 Trillion?  They are going to print it out of thin air.  We are in the midst of the largest currency debasement ever seen in human history.  There is only one result that can come of currency debasement:  hyperinflation and total economic and societal collapse.

Have you also forgotten the so-called “Bush tax cuts”?  Yeah.  Those rates are going to expire on January 1, 2013.  Obama will presumably still be occupying the Oval Office at that time assuming that he is not forcibly removed or that the Republic is still intact at that time.  Taxes will increase significantly at that point, and the Congressional Budget Office has scored everything put before them given the fact of the massive tax increases on 1/1/2013.  Do you understand that?  When these Republicans and even these so-called “Tea Party Freshmen” tell you that there are no tax hikes in their “plan,” they are consciously, willfully, knowingly lying to you through their teeth.

Finally, I do not understand how it can possibly be that conservative writers are still addressing Obama as if he is actually trying to help the economy, but his well-intentioned policies are failing.

Obama is the enemy.  Obama is a Marxist-Communist usurper and puppet front for a cabal of Marxist-Communists who are actively trying to destroy the United States of America.  Everything they have done, are doing, and will do has the single goal of collapsing and destroying the U.S. economy, military, constitutional government and culture. 

What part of “Marxist Revolution” do you not understand? 

1. The Obama regime is not a failure.  The Obama regime is not incompetent.  The Obama regime has achieved more in two and a half years than anyone could have possibly foreseen.
2.  It has debased the currency by 50% of the GDP and guaranteed that our economy will collapse. 
3. It has looted the Treasury for more than the size of a top-ten economy and embezzled that wealth into the hands of their fellow Marxists in preparation for the final collapse of the United States.
   
4. It has ground the economy of the United States to a screeching halt.
   
5.  It has destabilized the entire Muslim world and ensured that there will be a nuclear war centered around Israel within the decade. 

The Obama regime has no interest whatsoever in “stimulus” or “getting folks back to work.”  How can you not understand this?  How can we possibly win this war if we refuse to come to terms with the fact that we are in fact fighting a war.              

God save the United States of America, because the people are far too stupid to do it themselves.

Ann Barnhardt is a livestock and grain commodity broker and marketing consultant, American patriot, traditional Catholic, and unwitting counter-revolutionary blogger.  She can be reached through her business at www.barnhardt.biz.

H/T Kelleigh

~LTG

3 Facts You Should Know About Obama’s War

Obama inherited two wars from his predecessor – Iraq and Afghanistan. But he can’t blame Bush for the war he initiated more than a week ago against the Gaddafi regime in Libya. That’s Obama’s War, even if he obfuscates by calling it a “Kinetic Military Action” — an Orwellian euphemistic New Speak that no one in the MSM has the elemental courage to point out. A war by whatever name smells just as foul.

Obama couldn’t be bothered to consult Congress — the institution that alone has the Constitutional authority to declare wars. From his junket in South America, as Commander In Chief, he gave the “go” signal to our military to fly those F-15 jets and fire those Tomahawk cruise missiles on Libya. He rattled on at length about his March Madness basketball picks, but nothing about his kinetic war.

On Monday night, His Wordiness finally deigned to give the American people an accounting — a justification — for his war with a speech containing 3,362 words. To save you time (April 15th is only 17 days away!), Fellowship of the Minds cut through his verbiage. Here are THREE things you really need to know about Obama’s War:

Fact No. 1:

On March 28, 2011, Obama’s Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the United States HAS NO VITAL INTERESTS in Libya.

Fact No. 2:

On March 28, 2011, the Pentagon said that the cost to US taxpayers of Obama’s “kinetic military action” war in Libya was $600 MILLION for the first week:

• U.S. ships and submarines in the Mediterranean have unleashed at least 191 Tomahawk cruise missiles to the tune of $268.8 million.
• U.S. warplanes have dropped 455 precision guided bombs, costing tens of thousands of dollars each.
• A downed Air Force F-15E fighter jet will cost more than $60 million to replace.
• Operation of the war craft, guzzling ever-expensive fuel to maintain their positions off the Libyan coast and in the skies above, could reach millions of dollars a week.

Fact No. 3:

On March 29, 2011, at approxmately 7pm, west coast time:

• The U.S. national debt is OVER 14 TRILLION DOLLARS: $14,262,703,284,888.
• US gross domestic product is $14,639, 682,230,000 (which means our national debt is almost the equivalent of our GDP!)
• Debt per citizen is $45,949.
• Debt per taxpayer is $128,383.

Put simply:

1. America is broke.
2. Obama’s War serves no national interest.
3. We can’t afford Obama’s war.

Got it?

~Eowyn

Economist Says Real US Debt is $200 Trillion

This is truly frightening.

A Boston University economist, Laurence Kotlikoff, maintains America’s national debt is actually much much higher than the already terrible $13.5 trillion. Kotlikoff thinks it’s 14 times bigger — $200 trillion!

~Eowyn

The scary actual U.S. government debt

By Neil Reynolds - Globe and Mail - October 27, 2010

Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff says U.S. government debt is not $13.5-trillion (U.S.), which is 60% of current gross domestic product, as global investors and American taxpayers think, but rather 14-fold higher: $200-trillion – 840% of current GDP. “Let’s get real,” Prof. Kotlikoff says. “The U.S. is bankrupt.”

Writing in the September issue of Finance and Development, a journal of the International Monetary Fund, Prof. Kotlikoff says the IMF itself has quietly confirmed that the U.S. is in terrible fiscal trouble – far worse than the Washington-based lender of last resort has previously acknowledged. “The U.S. fiscal gap is huge,” the IMF asserted in a June report. “Closing the fiscal gap requires a permanent annual fiscal adjustment equal to about 14% of U.S. GDP.”

This sum is equal to all current U.S. federal taxes combined. The consequences of the IMF’s fiscal fix, a doubling of federal taxes in perpetuity, would be appalling – and possibly worse than appalling.

Prof. Kotlikoff says: “The IMF is saying that, to close this fiscal gap [by taxation], would require an immediate and permanent doubling of our personal income taxes, our corporate taxes and all other federal taxes. America’s fiscal gap is enormous – so massive that closing it appears impossible without immediate and radical reforms to its health care, tax and Social Security systems – as well as military and other discretionary spending cuts.”

He cites earlier calculations by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that concluded that the United States would need to increase tax revenue by 12 percentage points of GDP to bring revenue into line with spending commitments. But the CBO calculations assumed that the growth of government programs (including Medicare) would be cut by one-third in the short term and by two-thirds in the long term. This assumption, Prof. Kotlikoff notes, is politically implausible – if not politically impossible.

One way or another, the fiscal gap must be closed. If not, the country’s spending will forever exceed its revenue growth, and no one’s real debt can increase faster than his real income forever.

Prof. Kotlikoff uses “fiscal gap,” not the accumulation of deficits, to define public debt. The fiscal gap is the difference between a government’s projected revenue (expressed in today’s dollar value) and its projected spending (also expressed in today’s dollar value). By this measure, the United States is in worse shape than Greece.

Prof. Kotlikoff is a noted economist. He is a research associate at the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research. He is a former senior economist with then-president Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers. He has served as a consultant with governments around the world. He is the author (or co-author) of 14 books: Jimmy Stewart Is Dead (2010), his most recent book, explains his recommendations for reform.

He says the U.S. cannot end its fiscal crisis by increasing taxes. He opposes further stimulus spending because it will simply increase the debt. But he does suggest reforms that would help – most of which would require a significant withering away of the state. He proposes that the government give every person an annual voucher for health care, provided that the total cost not exceed 10 per cent of GDP. (U.S. health care now consumes 16% of GDP.) He suggests the replacement of all current federal taxes with a single consumption tax of 18%. He calls for government-sponsored personal retirement accounts, with the government making contributions only for the poor, the unemployed and people with disabilities.

Without drastic reform, Prof. Kotlikoff says, the only alternative would be a massive printing of money by the U.S. Treasury – and hyperinflation.

As former president Bill Clinton once prematurely said, the era of big government is over. In the coming years, the U.S. will almost certainly be compelled to deconstruct its welfare state.

Prof. Kotlikoff doesn’t trust government accounting, or government regulation. The official vocabulary (deficit, debt, transfer payment, tax, borrowing), he says, is vulnerable to official manipulation and off-the-books deceit. He calls it “Enron accounting.” He also calls it a lie. Here is an economist who speaks plainly, as the legendary straight-shooting film star Jimmy Stewart did for an earlier generation.

But Prof. Kotlikoff’s economic genre isn’t the Western. It’s the horror story – “and scarier,” one reviewer of his book suggests, than Stephen King.

Condi Rice Shills For Obama

The bipartisan Political Ruling Class look out for their own, always.

Last Friday, October 15, 2010, former Bush administration secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, a supposed Republican, took time from her book tour to meet one-on-one with Obama in the Oval Office.

Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post reports:

The White House said Obama wanted to discuss a range of foreign policy issues with her.

Later, at an evening appearance at the Aspen Institute, Rice said she and Obama “covered the waterfront.” “Despite the fact there are changes and tussles, there is still a foreign policy community that believes that foreign policy ought to be bipartisan,” she said. “It was really great that he reached out in that way.”

Rice rolled her eyes at the notion that Obama is a closet Muslim, and she defended him from criticism – led by former vice president Richard B. Cheney – that Obama had weakened the country. “Nothing in this president’s methods suggests this president is other than a defender of America’s interests,” Rice told an audience that included presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett.

[...] Speaking to Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly, she lavished praise on her successor, Hillary Rodham Clinton: “I think she is doing a lot of the right things. . . . She is very tough. . . . I think she has done a fine job, I really do.”

Rice even chastised former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) for his assertion that Obama has a “Kenyan, anticolonial” worldview. “That’s over the top, and I don’t think very helpful,” she told Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC.

Obama’s reckless spending is bankrupting America, piling on our national debt in trillions of dollars. As of October 10, 2010, the “Total Public Debt Outstanding” was $13.616 trillion, which is 94% of America’s annual GDP (gross domestic product). The debt is projected to nearly double to $20 trillion by 2015, but is expected to increase to nearly 100% of GDP by 2020 and remain at that level thereafter. [Source: Wikipedia]

But Condi Rice assures us that ”Nothing in this president’s methods suggests this president is other than a defender of America’s interests.” Everything’s just okie dokie!

If Rice ever runs for elective office — walk, don’t run, from her as fast as you can! She’s a RINO!

~Eowyn