"It is not enough to know that there is a shadow government pulling the strings of the visible government- we must also act to expose it, and defeat it!"-Mark Matheny
HAMILTON — Michael Halcomb and Tom Long are nosey. They are always on the lookout for shadows in the night, something out of place or just plain suspicious activity in Butler County neighborhoods.
And residents don’t mind a bit.
Halcomb of Trenton and Tom Long, a Hamilton resident, team up regularly to be the eyes and ears of the sheriff’s office as part of the Citizens on Patrol program. Both laughed when asked if the pay is good.
“Oh, I have mine direct deposit,” said Long, a 70-year-old retiree, with a laugh.
They, like the eight other COP members, are volunteers.
Patrolling in a special cruiser with a yellow light bar, COP members assist deputies with traffic control at crashes and fires, aid to stranded motorists and making vacation checks for residents who call the sheriff’s office for security when they are out of town.
“They really free up deputies to do more pressing duties,” said Lt. Jean Collett, support service superior in charge of the unit.
Last week, Long and Halcomb were checking houses in a Liberty Twp. subdivision when they spotted a man who just didn’t seem to be “acting quite right.”
“It was dark and raining to start with. He was walking in the street then stopping and looking around. He didn’t stop to ask for directions, he wasn’t walking a dog and he didn’t have a cigarette,” Long said, noting all possible reasons to be walking in a storm.
Halcomb added, “he was fidgety. It just didn’t fit.”
COP units are not armed or permitted to act if presented with criminal activity, so Long said they called “the big dogs.”
Deputies thought the man may be a thief looking to kick in a door or swipe a stereo from a car. Detectives determined he was wanted on warrants from Hamilton Municipal Court and took him into custody.
Last year, the COP unit made 724 vacation checks and drove 10, 550 miles on patrol.
Halcomb chuckled remembering a startled resident who returned home early from vacation and was loading his riding mower when COP volunteers came for a vacation check.
“We called the deputies out on him,” Halcomb said. “After it was straightened out, he was glad we were doing our job.”
Contact this reporter at (513) 820-2168 or lpack@coxohio.com.
ABC, CBS and NBC reports on federal budget give the president pass on spending, ignore critical liberal and conservative economists who argue it is 'unsustainable.'
President Obama just submitted a $3.8 trillion budget proposal, the largest federal budget ever, which will come with a “record amount of red ink.” The projected deficit of that budget would be $1.6 trillion, yet the networks didn’t criticize him for being spendy.
To put this in perspective: Obama is proposing a budget $700 billion larger than big spender Pres. George W. Bush’s last budget. It’s TWICE the size of Pres. Bill Clinton’s last budget of $1.9 trillion, who was credited with generating a budget surplus.
Despite the “staggering” size of Obama’s budget, which broadcast networks admitted was “dripping with red ink,” the reports managed to paint him as a fiscal conservative and deficit slasher.
NBC’s Savannah Guthrie portrayed all the excess spending as a way to get the economy back on track saying: “He’s asking for $100 billion to spur job growth – things like tax cuts for small business, tax breaks to increase wages – and he’s doing this knowing that it will drive up the deficit, certainly even more in the short term. But all economists agree the real way to get a chunk out of the deficit is to increase hiring.”
But Guthrie was highlighting only a tiny fraction of the overall budget and failed to criticize the administration for not finding ways to cut more waste.
CBS’s Bill Plante also agreed with Obama’s spending priorities for the $3.8 trillion budget Feb. 1 when he said the president “needs” to spend right now.
“The president has a serious money problem. He needs to spend more money in the short-term to create jobs, but he desperately needs to spend a lot less over the long-term,” Plante said on “The Early Show.”
Obama began his budget announcement on Feb. 1 by once again passing the buck to “previous administrations.” Clearly blaming Bush for what he termed a “decade of profligacy,” Obama criticized the funding of two wars, prescription drug spending and tax cuts before presenting himself as a fiscal conservative.
ABC’s David Muir must have bought it, because his Feb. 1 “World News” report echoed Obama. Muir pinned the record deficits on President Bush’s tax cuts and war spending when he answered the question: “How did we get here?”
His timeline of the expanding federal deficit began with an image of Bush signing a bill and the words “Tax relief for America.” This has long been the claim of the national news media. While Bush was certainly responsible for helping balloon the federal deficit, American’s for Tax Reform’s tax policy director Ryan Ellis told the Business & Media Institute the tax cuts weren’t the problem, overspending was.
“The networks are stupid if they think tax cuts had anything to do with this,” Ellis explained. Tax revenues were higher than the average when Bush took office, but fell before the tax cuts because of the dot-com bust and the 2001 recession.
“Federal tax revenues are much more dependent on the economy than they are on tax policy. Tax revenues ROSE as a percent of the economy in the years after the BTC (Bush Tax Cuts) became law. They only fell again when the economy imploded.”
According to Ellis and others, the real problem is government spending. Even a budget expert with the liberal Brookings Institution told the Wall Street Journal that Obama’s “proposals will still leave us with unsustainable deficits as far as the eye can see.”
Yet, none of the broadcast network morning or evening news shows mentioned that Bush’s last budget was $700 billion less than Obama’s proposal for 2011 or that Clinton’s last (nominal) budget was half its size.
A couple of those reports cited political dissatisfaction with Obama’s budget but none actually criticized Obama for spending too much.
Obama the Fiscal Conservative
While it seems impossible that the media could paint the man proposing the largest federal budget in history as waste-cutting and fiscally responsible, that’s exactly what they did.
NBC’s “Nightly News” followed up its Feb. 1 budget report with a “Fleecing of America” report on waste in defense spending. Lisa Myers report highlighted one particular project that made Congress look bad and Obama look good the very same day he proposed massive spending increases.
“The C-17 cargo plane is the workhorse of the military. It carries troops and equipment to war zones, helps in a crisis like Haiti. Just about everyone agrees the C-17 is a terrific plane. But the Pentagon has said it has enough and wants to stop buying them. Still, Congress just voted to build 10 more planes. Cost: $2.5 billion. Today the president said this makes no sense,” Myers said before cutting to video of Obama calling the project “waste, pure and simple.”
An ABC report on Feb. 1 also made Obama out to be fiscally responsible. Jake Tapper reported, “On the same day President Obama introduced his massive budget, he acknowledged that government spending cannot continue at this pace.”
Then he quoted Obama, who said, “The bottom line is this. We simply cannot continue to spend as if deficits don’t have consequences, as if waste doesn’t matter, as if the hard-earned tax dollars of the American people can be treated like Monopoly money.”
No one in that report suggested that was exactly what Obama’s budget would do. Tapper quoted one Democrat and one Republican opposed to a piece of the budget, but did not consult anyone suggesting the budget as a whole is simply enormous and irresponsible.
Obama has requested $49.7 billion for the Dept. of Education, which appropriated $38.4 billion in 2000. He also plans to expand the budget for the Dept. of Energy to $28.4 billion. In 2000, that agency’s budget was just under $15 billion according to historical tables on the OMB Web site.
Since Obama took office the networks have cheered for government spending on the stimulus package and bailouts, protected him from rising unemployment and now with the budget reports they’ve taken the spin to a whole new level by portraying the spendthrift as a cost-cutting champion.
Let the Administration Do the Talking
Network reports on Obama’s budget favorably quoted administration officials (Obama, budget director Peter Orszag, press secretary Robert Gibbs) a number of times, but mostly ignored tax or economic experts critical of the budget.
All three networks’ morning and evening newscasts reported the 2011 budget announcement on Feb. 1. In those reports, administration officials were quoted or interviewed seven times. Four other politicians were included in reports, but only a single economic expert was brought on. That was Robert Bixby of the Concord Coalition, a non-profit devoted to fiscal responsibility.
The networks should have consulted more budget and tax experts including Isabel Sawhill, a budget expert at the liberal Brookings Institution. The Wall Street Journal on Feb. 1 quoted her as saying, “‘The pay-go rules will make it more difficult for Congress to dig the hole deeper but won't affect currently projected red ink; and the commission will likely be a paper tiger,’ she wrote on Friday. ‘In short, these proposals will still leave us with unsustainable deficits as far as the eye can see. It is depressing to discover that we can no longer even aspire to balance the budget once the recession is over.’”
Michael Pento, chief economist at Delta Global Advisors, called Obama’s budget “so outrageously egregious that he had to hold a special press conference on Monday just to spin the news.”
Pento warned that the massive federal deficits, which are projected to be between $700 billion and $1 trillion through 2002, will push the U.S. economy “over the cliff.”
If you think a $3.8 trillion budget is bad, just wait and see what the government actually spends. The problem with budgets is that they are based on assumptions of revenue and spending and often, those don’t come true.
CATO’s Chris Edwards provided an example in the National Review online at CATO’s Web site Feb. 1. He explained that in his first budget, Bush proposed to increase spending “at a healthy clip, rising to $2.71 trillion by 2011.”
“The lesson from all this is that an administration’s promised spending beyond the first year is meaningless,” Edwards wrote.
Obama’s budget also has plenty of assumptions in it that might not come true. Health care reform, which ABC’s Jake Tapper described as on “life support” is figured into the budget, but potential costs of cap-and-trade are not. NBC proved its support for ObamaCare by saying that without its passage it would “tack on” another $150 billion to the deficit, since the 2011 budget assumes its cost savings.
According to Ellis, the budget also assumes an economic growth rate of 3.35 real GDP growth. That he said is “rosy,” given the fact that real GDP has averaged 2.89 percent since 1980.
University of Maryland economic professor Peter Morici was also skeptical: “If your staff economist tells you that [growth rates assumed in the budget] is realistic, fire him.”
The network budget reports didn’t provide that viewpoint.
Washington (CNN) - The director of U.S. national intelligence said the government has the right to kill Americans abroad if they present a direct threat to U.S. security.
The admission from Dennis Blair came Wednesday at a House Intelligence Committee hearing on the annual threat assessment.
"We take direct action against terrorists in the intelligence community," Blair told lawmakers at the hearing. "If that direct action -- we think that direct action will involve killing an American, we get specific permission to do that."
Blair said the reason he made the admission was to reassure Americans.
"We're not careless about endangering American lives as we try to carry out the policies to protect most of the country," he said.
Blair went on to say the United States does not target Americans for taking part in free speech, but rather will target them if they threaten other Americans or the United States.
Topping the list of such Americans may be Anwar al-Awlaki, currently living in Yemen. Privately, many administration officials said he is one of the next American citizens abroad with whom the U.S. intelligence community wants to deal.
Al-Awlaki is a fugitive American-born preacher whom a U.S. counterterrorism official described as a "key associate of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula's top leaders and one of their go-to men for external plotting."
Another American security official told CNN that U.S. authorities want al-Awlaki for questioning but denied there is an explicit order to "take him out."
U.S. security sources said last month they had concrete and independent confirmation that al-Awlaki had met with Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab, the Nigerian accused in the failed Christmas Day bomb plot aboard a plane heading to Detroit, Michigan.
Israel is warning Syria not to attack the Jewish state and says the Syrian president's regime would collapse in case of a future conflict.
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman's made the warning at a lecture at Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv on Thursday.
His comments came a day after Syria's foreign minister accused Israel of warmongering. Syrian President Bashar Assad has also accused Israel of not being ready for peace.
Lieberman warned Assad: "In the next war, not only will you lose but you and your family will lose power."
Several rounds of indirect peace talks between Syria and Israel ended without a breakthrough in 2008.
Syria demands the return of Golan Heights - the strategic plateau Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast war - as the price of any deal.
Legislation to Establish Internment Camps on US Military Bases
by Michel Chossudovsky Global Research.ca
The Economic and Social Crisis
The financial meltdown has unleashed a latent and emergent social crisis across the United States.
What is at stake is the fraudulent confiscation of lifelong savings and pension funds, the appropriation of tax revenues to finance the trillion dollar "bank bailouts", which ultimately serve to line the pockets of the richest people in America.
This economic crisis is in large part the result of financial manipulation and outright fraud to the detriment of entire populations, leading to a renewed wave of corporate bankruptcies, mass unemployment and poverty.
The criminalization of the global financial system, characterized by a "Shadow Banking" network has resulted in the centralization of bank power and an unprecedented concentration of private wealth.
Obama's "economic stimulus" package and budget proposals contribute to a further process of concentration and centralization of bank power, the cumulative effects of which will eventually resul in large scale corporate, bankruptcies, a new wave of foreclosures not to mention fiscal collapse and the downfall of State social programs. (For further details see Michel Chossudovsky, America's Fiscal Collapse, Global Research, March 2, 2009).
The cumulative decline of real economic activity backlashes on employment and wages, which in turn leads to a collapse in purchaisng power. The proposed "solution" under the Obama administration contributes to exacerbating rather than alleviating social inequalities and the process of wealth concentration.
Look at the sky Thursday afternoon. You might see the “Fighting Falcons” overhead.
The Fighting Falcons, also known as F-16 dogfighter aircraft, will fly maneuvers over the Canton area as part of an air-defense training staged by members of the Toledo-based Ohio Air National Guard 180th Fighter Wing.
“There will probably be two or three in the air,” said Navy Lt. Cmdr. Gary Ross, serving at the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) in Colorado. “They will probably be about 2,000 or 3,000 feet (above ground). It will be visible to people on the ground. These will be fighters escorting general aviation aircraft as part of the exercise.”
NORAD is coordinating the mock defense maneuvers nationwide, preparing military personnel to identify and defend against domestic hostile acts such as the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The other aircraft will be flown by pilots under contract who will pose as enemy combatants. The 180th Fighter Wing will stage similar maneuvers Thursday afternoon over the Toledo and Youngstown areas.
“We have fighter jets throughout the country, and we need to train them in their environment,” said Ross by telephone from the Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs. “We test throughout the country at various times to make sure their test procedures are up to the mark. Before Sept. 11 (2001), we basically looked outside Canada and the United States for intrusions. The difference now is we monitor all flights that are internal and external.”
NORAD, which began in the late 1950s, is a joint organization between the United States and Canada which started out with the intent of providing defense against possible attack by the Soviet Union by way of the Arctic.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, NORAD launched its Operation Noble Eagle initiative. It focuses on monitoring aircraft flying in the United States.
Copyright 2010 CantonRep.com. Some rights reserved
Gold has consolidated 50% of its big run-up since July — and many market watchers say it’s cheap here. Should you buy gold now? In this video, I give you my view on that, and my take on some of the forces driving gold and the U.S. dollar.
Yours for trading profits,
Sean
New ETFs make investing in euros, yens, pounds and other currencies as easy as buying stock in IBM or Microsoft. And we’ve all seen how dramatically the U.S. dollar can fall — or rise — against them. Do currency ETFs have a place in your portfolio? Click here to let us know your take on currencies.
The Globalists have allowed Obama to throw you and me under the bus again, continuing the collectivist blueprint, set by Agenda 21, Sustainable Development, with the new High Speed Rail system. “PJ O’Rourke sums it up in simple terms:
“Politicians love trains. Why? Because they can tell where the tracks go. They know where everybody’s going. For politicians it’s all about control and power. Politicians hate cars because cars make people free.” (1)
Before detailing the specifics of why bullet trains are impractical, we will switch tracks here to gain a deeper understanding of the Globalists’ scheme and how bullet trains fit into the agenda. “In an interview with Michael Shaw, www.freedomadvocates.org, he explained that”when you understand the intent of the Globalists’ action plan, Agenda 21, Sustainable Development, it becomes very clear that the government spending and debt not only serve to bankrupt individuals, but also to install new structures of control. “These structures at the local level are called “Smart Growth”.
The transportation system of the New World Order excludes private auto mobility. “In an effort to remove people from cars, traffic congestion is allowed to grow exponentially, with a refusal, by planners, to expand highways and accommodate more traffic. “Of course, local and state governments are influenced by federal money, and thereby under its control, falling prey to its designs.
Smart Growth solutions are offered as a substitute increase Collectivists’ control. “These “solutions” include creating living areas where travel is discouraged (high rises on top of storefronts so you never have to leave the area) and offering public transportation, in order to get us out of our private automobiles. “This evaporates our unalienable rights on several levels: exterminating freedom by limiting movement, travel and choice, as well as ultimately abolishing private property (privately owned cars- and everything else you think you own).
The right-to-life movement is a failure. Although millions of dollars have been spent on lobbying, marches, and protests since the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, millions of women have still had abortions since then. There is no doubt that many abortions have been prevented, but even a round number of how many is almost impossible to estimate. The pro-life movement has failed miserably to persuade women to not have abortions, to educate women on the evils of abortion, to prevent unwanted pregnancies, to convince doctors to not perform abortions, to effectively counsel women with unwanted pregnancies, to impede promiscuity, and to provide sufficient alternatives to pregnant women considering abortion.
Pro-lifers are quick to lay the blame on the Supreme Court, activist federal judges, Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, feminists, doctors who perform abortions, the Democratic Party, and liberals – anywhere and anyone but themselves and the women who actually have abortions.
According to most pro-lifers, the solution to the abortion problem is not persuasion, education, or counseling; it is more centralization of power in the federal government – the same government that, in a vast power grab that did violence to the Constitution, asserted federal supremacy over the states’ abortion laws in the Roe v. Wade decision.
It is amazing how many financial analysts usually from the too big to fail banks have gone onto the media circuit to claim that employment is always a lagging indicator in economic recoveries. They preach this belief as if it were a law like thermodynamics. These same people who never envisioned a stock market collapse rivaling the Great Depression now want the public to believe their flawed doctrine of economic prosperity. Yet the question is prosperity for who? How are we supposed to trust an industry filled of self-labeled experts that missed the biggest financial crisis in modern times? This is like a pharmacist who doesn’t know what drug to give you or a baseball player who can’t swing a bat. We can’t trust Wall Street for a variety of reasons including they are part of the nucleus for this economic calamity.
Being a Veteran in the fight to Preserve Our Liberties and a guardian in the defense of our Constitution has led me to reflect on the brave souls of past days who sacrificed and with much dedication forged and bulldozed the path for present day patriots. They suffered the smears, lies, name-calling and concerted efforts of the enemies of freedom to silence them.
Among them of course would be many individuals and of course the group in the forefront, The John Birch Society, is an organization with truth as a weapon and education as their total strategy. How well I remember the published works of Robert Welsh, Founder of the John Birch Society, and his speeches I attended. The magazine 'American Opinion' ( now 'The New American') a publication I couldn't wait to recieve and would read cover to cover the very day it arrived in my mailbox. The writers were such a treat, the manner in which they wrote, with a gift to help the hard factual 'medicine' of truth go down. The generous supply of 'meaty' informational articles, the substance of which I chew on to this very day coming from the creative minds of Alan Stang, Gary Allen, E Merrill Root etc, and from Robert Welsh himself.
I remember getting my first issue when I thought I was reading a different language - My past courses in 'Problems of Democracy' in the government brain laundry factories had not prepared me sufficiently to tackle this new found source of 'meaty' information flow. Being horribly economic, the surge of truthful information flowing through my veins invigorated me, and I was hooked into self mode Conspiracy Civics Class along with others who sensed something was wrong in our beloved country, and that 'it' wasn't happening by accident.
These fine gentilemen warriors, authors, and speakers - many of whom I have met - and especially Robert Welsh, were not afraid to step out front- to speculate, to forecast based on past factual information and events-or to expose those who were a part of the globalist CONSPIRACY. Oh- there's that word that some novices who have come into the movement would have us delete down the Orwellian memory hole so as to appeal to the masses in order to get our message to them so they will accept it more easily.
How sad that now we have those in our midst who would want to water down the truth message- I am an example of why this compromising strategy is a failure and a 'deathbed' approach, as well as an insult to Robert Welsh and his memory. I suggest we go back and read some of his works and back issues of American Opinion to see how far we have succumbed to this shameful thinking and cowardly strategy. Robert Welsh was not a member of the "Let's Be Safe" limited message society, nor the " Let's not talk Conspiracy" message of compromise who harp that we shouldn't say certain perimeters in order to reach potential freedom fighting prospects. What these mental slugs and cowards are really saying is "Let's throw Robert Welsh under the globalist bus" in order to get the message out.
Such thinking and strategy encompasses some of the following---
"Let's not call it conspiracy or use the word"
"Let's not question 9/11 prior knowedge, or even question this horrendous act of treason"
"Let's not speculate or expose those in the media who get their paychecks written by their boss who is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations- after all, he does give out a lot of good information. So what if he wants a Constitutional Convention!" (Good info laced with 1% arsenic is still deadly)
"There's a lot of erroneous material out there on the net" ( So Surf and sift)
"Let's not bother with those dreadful FEMA Camps, if they even exist - investigating them- what a waste ( tell that to the German People) they were just fusion centers."
Here's just a few other topics some would like to throw under the bus:
Chemtrails
weather modification
Government complicity in drug running ( But just say no)
Mind control
Computerized vote fraud (Don't forget to write your Bought and Paid for preselected Politician)
CIA drug smuggling
HAARP
Government sponsored False Flag terrorism
etc, etc, and on and on.
Let's just forget about the memory of the Congressman Larry McDonald and move on - instead of making him and John Birch as our examples and figureheads in this fight! ......Larry who????
Well, let's just deal with things we can prove.
Did Robert Welsh have this mindset???? Read The Politician and the rest of his writings, and his brilliant commentaries on the signs of the times- and then let's get busy and sharpen our swords and throw the true slugs and those who wish to be 'respectable' instead of warriors under the bus, and put Robert Welsh back in the driver's seat- his memories live on and his printed words speak volumes.
