Rand Paul: Fight The Nanny State – Exclusive High Quality

Infowars.com
May 13, 2012

Rand Paul speaks at The Tea Party Express rally at the Capitol in Austin, Texas, on Sunday May 6, 2012.

How will gay marriage play on the ground?

Fox News

May 14, 2012

YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio –  On the upper eastern edge of Ohio lies a valley built on the sweat of the working class, where steel mills sit mostly shuttered but a once-struggling Chevy plant endures. It is a place filled with union halls and blue-collar families for whom the auto bailout meant survival, delivered by a president many here see as their savior.

The Mahoning Valley is, without question, Barack Obama country. And native Andre Allie is very much a Barack Obama man: An African-American who "went with history" by voting for him in 2008. A retired auto worker who made air-bag parts. A lifelong Democrat and union member whose wife, brothers, aunt, cousins are all Democrats and union folks, too.

But Allie is also a deeply religious man, an elder deacon at his Baptist church who quotes from the Bible with ease. And he fervently opposes what the president last week decided to publicly support. "It's wrong. Period. It's just wrong," Allie, 54, says of the latest issue to push to the front of the presidential campaign.

Obama's declaration in support of gay marriage was undoubtedly a milestone in American politics and culture. But six months from an election that will decide whether the president keeps his job, a question hovers over the moment: Was it, somehow, a game-changer?

In three very different regions of a state where the election could be won or lost, voters themselves have been considering that. And their reflections reveal something far more pragmatic than an electorate that shifts its views because of the headline of the day, no matter how historic.

Allie is but one example, a voter as adamant in his opposition to same-sex marriage as he is in his support — still — of Obama. In his words: "The world is bigger than gay marriage."

And yet something has sprung from the dialogue the president's words compelled. It may be far more subtle than a changed mind or a changed vote, but it is there all the same.

Read the entire article

Unprecedented Maya Mural Found, Contradicts 2012 "Doomsday" Myth

Erik Vance in Xultún, Guatemala

for National Geographic News

Updated 5:28 p.m. ET, May 10, 2012

In the last known largely unexcavated Maya megacity, archaeologists have uncovered the only known mural adorning an ancient Maya house, a new study says—and it's not just any mural.

In addition to a still vibrant scene of a king and his retinue, the walls are rife with calculations that helped ancient scribes track vast amounts of time. Contrary to the idea the Maya predicted the end of the world in 2012, the markings suggest dates thousands of years in the future.

Perhaps most important, the otherwise humble chamber offers a rare glimpse into the inner workings of Maya society. (Video: "Mysterious Maya Calendar & Mural Uncovered.")

"The paintings we have here—we've never found them anyplace else," excavation leader William Saturno told National Geographic News.

And in today's Xultún—to the untrained eye, just 6 square miles (16 square kilometers) of jungle floor—it's a wonder Saturno's team found the artwork at all.

At the Guatemalan site in 2010 the Boston University archaeologist and Ph.D. student Franco Rossi were inspecting a looters' tunnel, where an undergraduate student had noticed the faintest traces of paint on a thin stucco wall.

The pair began cleaning off 1,200-year-old mud and suddenly a little more red paint appeared.

"Suddenly Bill was like, 'Oh my God, we have a glyph!'" Rossi said.

Read the entire article

No need for war to 'destroy' Israel: Ahmadinejad

Yahoo News
May 13, 2012

President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, pictured here on May 4, said on Saturday that war was not essential to achieve the "destruction" of Israel, Iran's state news agency IRNA reported. Ahmadinejad, who is known for making fiery speeches against Iran's archfoe Israel, has dubbed the Jewish state a "cancerous tumor" which is destined to be eliminated from the region. (AFP Photo/Atta Kenare)

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Saturday that war was not essential to achieve the destruction of Israel, Iran's state news agency IRNA reported.

"The destruction of the Zionist regime does not necessitate making war," he said in a speech during a tour of northeast Iran.

"If countries of the region cut ties with the Zionists and give them dirty looks, it will spell the end of this puppet regime," said the hardline Iranian leader.

Ahmadinejad, who is known for making fiery speeches against Iran's archfoe Israel, has dubbed the Jewish state a "cancerous tumor" which is destined to be eliminated from the region.

The president on Saturday also mocked Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich Arab states of the Gulf over their huge oil contracts with the West, especially Israel's US ally.

"If the leaders of these countries had some brains, they would not sell their petrol just to buy 60 billion dollars worth of arms," he said.

JP Morgan’s $2 Billion Loss Just A Preview of Coming Derivatives Collapse

Economic Collapse Blog
May 12, 2012

When news broke of a 2 billion dollar trading loss by JP Morgan, much of the financial world was absolutely stunned. But the truth is that this is just the beginning. This is just a very small preview of what is going to happen when we see the collapse of the worldwide derivatives market. When most Americans think of Wall Street, they think of a bunch of stuffy bankers trading stocks and bonds. But over the past couple of decades it has evolved into much more than that. Today, Wall Street is the biggest casino in the entire world. When the “too big to fail” banks make good bets, they can make a lot of money. When they make bad bets, they can lose a lot of money, and that is exactly what just happened to JP Morgan. Their Chief Investment Office made a series of trades which turned out horribly, and it resulted in a loss of over 2 billion dollars over the past 40 days. But 2 billion dollars is small potatoes compared to the vast size of the global derivatives market. It has been estimated that the the notional value of all the derivatives in the world is somewhere between 600 trillion dollars and 1.5 quadrillion dollars. Nobody really knows the real amount, but when this derivatives bubble finally bursts there is not going to be nearly enough money on the entire planet to fix things.

Sadly, a lot of mainstream news reports are not even using the word “derivatives” when they discuss what just happened at JP Morgan. This morning I listened carefully as one reporter described the 2 billion dollar loss as simply a “bad bet”.

And perhaps that is easier for the American people to understand. JP Morgan made a series of really bad bets and during a conference call last night CEO Jamie Dimon admitted that the strategy was “flawed, complex, poorly reviewed, poorly executed and poorly monitored”.

The funny thing is that JP Morgan is considered to be much more “risk averse” than most other major Wall Street financial institutions are.

So if this kind of stuff is happening at JP Morgan, then what in the world is going on at some of these other places?

That is a really good question.

For those interested in the technical details of the 2 billion dollar loss, an article posted on CNBC described exactly how this loss happened….

The failed hedge likely involved a bet on the flattening of a credit derivative curve, part of the CDX family of investment grade credit indices, said two sources with knowledge of the industry, but not directly involved in the matter. JPMorgan was then caught by sharp moves at the long end of the bet, they said. The CDX index gives traders exposure to credit risk across a range of assets, and gets its value from a basket of individual credit derivatives.

In essence, JP Morgan made a series of bets which turned out very, very badly. This loss was so huge that it even caused members of Congress to take note. The following is from a statement that U.S. Senator Carl Levin issued a few hours after this news first broke….

“The enormous loss JPMorgan announced today is just the latest evidence that what banks call ‘hedges’ are often risky bets that so-called ‘too big to fail’ banks have no business making.”

Unfortunately, the losses from this trade may not be over yet. In fact, if things go very, very badly the losses could end up being much larger as a recent Zero Hedge article detailed….

Simple: because it knew with 100% certainty that if things turn out very, very badly, that the taxpayer, via the Fed, would come to its rescue. Luckily, things turned out only 80% bad. Although it is not over yet: if credit spreads soar, assuming at $200 million DV01, and a 100 bps move, JPM could suffer a $20 billion loss when all is said and done. But hey: at least “net” is not “gross” and we know, just know, that the SEC will get involved and make sure something like this never happens again.

And yes, the SEC has announced an “investigation” into this 2 billion dollar loss. But we all know that the SEC is basically useless. In recent years SEC employees have become known more for watching pornography in their Washington D.C. offices than for regulating Wall Street.

But what has become abundantly clear is that Wall Street is completely incapable of policing itself. This point was underscored in a recent commentary by Henry Blodget of Business Insider….

Wall Street can’t be trusted to manage—or even correctly assess—its own risks.

This is in part because, time and again, Wall Street has demonstrated that it doesn’t even KNOW what risks it is taking.

In short, Wall Street bankers are just a bunch of kids playing with dynamite.

There are two reasons for this, neither of which boil down to “stupidity.”

• The first reason is that the gambling instruments the banks now use are mind-bogglingly complicated. Warren Buffett once described derivatives as “weapons of mass destruction.” And those weapons have gotten a lot more complex in the past few years.

• The second reason is that Wall Street’s incentive structure is fundamentally flawed: Bankers get all of the upside for winning bets, and someone else—the government or shareholders—covers the downside.

The second reason is particularly insidious. The worst thing that can happen to a trader who blows a huge bet and demolishes his firm—literally the worst thing—is that he will get fired. Then he will immediately go get a job at a hedge fund and make more than he was making before he blew up the firm.

We never learned one of the basic lessons that we should have learned from the financial crisis of 2008.

Wall Street bankers take huge risks because the risk/reward ratio is all messed up.

Read the entire article

FLASHBACK: OBAMA’S SORDID HIGH SCHOOL PAST

Ben Shapiro
Breitbart
May 11, 2012

While the Washington Post has been diligently digging into relatively innocent high schoolpranks by Mitt Romney, they’ve spent the last few years diligently ignoring President Obama’s far more controversial high school days.

Obama, by all accounts, was a habitual drug user in high school. He tried cocaine, he admits in Dreams From My Father; he “tried drugs enthusiastically.” The Chicago Tribune reported back in 2007 that Obama thanked the “Choom Gang” in his high school yearbook; “chooming” was Hawaiian slang for smoking pot. TheHonolulu Advertiser reported that Obama’s senior portrait “prominently displayed … A package of ‘Zig-Zag’ rolling papers and a matchbook.” One of Obama’s close friends was arrested for drug possession during high school.

In his memoir, Obama talked about routinely getting high. “Junkie. Pothead,” he wrote. “That’s where I’d been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man.” But, according to Obama, he only got high because he was contemplating deep matters: drugs could “push questions of who I was out of my mind.”

Obama told students in 2007 that this activity constituted “goofing off” and “wasting time”:

"I will confess to you that I was kind of a goof off in high school as my mom reminded me," Obama said. "I went to high school in Hawaii, so there's a lot of opportunity to goof off because the weather is really good all the time …

"You know, I made some bad decisions …. You know, got into drinking and experimenting with drugs. There was a whole stretch of time where I didn't apply myself. It wasn't until I got out of … high school, and went to college that I started realizing, man, I wasted a lot of time.”

The New York Times, however, went out of its way to find Obama’s classmates to testify that drugs played only a “bit part” in Obama’s youth. Yet Obama would later brag on the campaign trail that he “inhaled frequently … that was the point.”

During his high school years, Obama hung out with communist radical Frank Marshall Davis; in 2007, the Los Angeles Timesreported that during his high school days, “he felt the first stirrings of anger toward whites. He says he also delved into black nationalism.” He was “offended or even enraged when white classmates adopted black street slang or revealed their underlying consciousness of his race by going out of their way to tell him how much they admired a black musician or athlete.”

This activity is certainly more reflective of Obama’s ideological history than Mitt Romney’s pranks on teachers and fellow students. And as for the drug use – well, that seems just a bit more serious than walking a teacher into a door or cutting a student’s hair. But leave it to the Post to ignore or downplay all of that in favor of continuing stories about Romney’s dog, his high school hijinks, and whatever other nonsense they can use to protect President Obama from his own incompetence.

Ben Shapiro is Breitbart News Editor-at-Large.  Follow him on twitter @benshapiro.

Shortfall in California’s Budget Swells to $16 Billion

ADAM NAGOURNEY
NY Times
May 13, 2012

LOS ANGELES — The state budget shortfall in California has increased dramatically in the last six months, forcing state officials to assemble a series of new spending cuts that are likely to mean further reductions to schools, health care and other social programs already battered by nearly five years of budget retrenchment, state officials announced on Saturday.

Gov. Jerry Brown, disclosing the development in a video posted on YouTube, said that California’s shortfall was now projected to be $16 billion, up from $9.2 billion in January. Mr. Brown said that he would propose a revised budget on Monday to deal with it.

“We are now facing a $16 billion hole, not the $9 billion we thought in January,” Mr. Brown said. “This means we will have to go much further and make cuts far greater than I asked for at the beginning of the year.”

Mr. Brown disclosed the news in a video that had all the trappings of a campaign announcement. In it, he aggressively accounted for the steps he said he had taken to try to scale back a $26 billion deficit he found upon taking office. And he urged viewers to back an initiative he is putting on the November ballot that would increase sales taxes by 0.25 percent and impose an income tax surcharge on wealthy Californians to try to stave off more cuts.

Read the entire article