Is This Wealth Redistribution Or Just Corruption? [Reader Post]
FloppingAces.net
Posted by: Skookum @ 2:50 pm, June 29, 2010
More than three billion dollars, packed into suitcases, loaded onto pallets, and declared to the Afghan authorities has been loaded onto airplanes and flown legally out of the country from Kabul International Airport in the last three years.
Officials believe some of the cash, if not most, is siphoned from Western aid projects and U.S., European and NATO contracts to provide security, supplies and reconstruction work for coalition forces in Afghanistan. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization spent about $14 billion here last year alone. Profits reaped from the opium trade are also a part of the money flow, as is cash earned by the Taliban from drugs and extortion, officials say.
The amount declared as it leaves the airport is vast in a nation where the gross domestic product last year totaled $13.5 billion. More declared cash flies out of Kabul each year than the Afghan government collects in tax and customs revenue nationwide. “It’s not like they grow money on trees here,” said a U.S. official investigating corruption and Taliban financing. “A lot of this looks like our tax dollars being stolen. And opium, of course.”
Radicals, Islamists and Longshoremen blockade Israeli ship in Oakland
PajamasMedia.com
June 20, 2010 – by Zombie
The protesters carried Turkish and Palestinian flags. Peace! (A false narrative)
An Israeli cargo ship arriving in Oakland today was forced to sit idle and not offload its containers when longshoremen joined forces with a coalition of communist and Islamist groups who picketed the port in protest against the recent violent incident off the coast of Gaza.
The ship, owned by Zim Lines, was not carrying any controversial cargo, nor is Zim involved in politics in any way; it was targeted simply because the shipping company is based in Israel.
The planned protest and blockade were organized by The Free Palestine Movement (one of the same groups which organized the Gaza “flotilla” in the first place) as well as a rogues’ gallery of nearly every communist, anti-Israel and radical Islamist group in the Bay Area:
Oakland, CA: Join the Labor and Community Picket of an Israeli Zim Lines Ship
Sunday, June 20, 5:30am
Port of Oakland,Berth 57, Middle Harbor Rd.
Protest Israel’s Attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla!
Boycott Israeli Ships and Goods!
Lift the Blockade NOW – Let Gaza Live!
Bring Down Israel’s Apartheid Wall!
We call on everyone who stands for justice and against occupation and apartheid to join the June 20 picket at the Port of Oakland. This is a moment of great opportunity. In San Francisco in 1984, a picket line and refusal to unload cargo of a ship carrying South African cargo was a key event in mobilizing the anti-apartheid movement worldwide.Sponsored by: Labor / Community Committee in Solidarity with the People of Palestine:
Arab American Union Members Council, ANSWER- Act Now to Stop War and End Racism, Palestine Youth Network, US Palestine Community Network, Al Awda- Right to Return Coalition, Arab Youth Organization, MECA-Middle East Children’s Alliance, Students for Justice in Palestine, Arab Resource and Organizing Center, International Solidarity Movement, San Jose Peace and Justice Center, International Socialist Organization, Peace and Freedom Party – SF, Transport Workers Solidarity Committee and many labor activists in the Bay Area
However, you wouldn’t know any of this if you had just read the mainstream media’s reportage. For example, the San Francisco Chronicle described the protesters as “peace and labor groups”:
Kagan’s SCOTUS deception to defend partial-birth abortions
HotAir.com
posted at 12:55 pm on June 29, 2010 by Ed Morrissey
printer-friendly
As Elena Kagan attempts to sail through a confirmation process to take her first job as a judge on the nation’s highest court, National Review’s Shannen Coffin discovers one of the reasons why the Clinton Library seemed determined to keep records of her previous work quiet. The issue of partial-birth abortion had raged during the Clinton years, with the President ultimately vetoing a measure by Congress to ban the procedure, but Nebraska banned it on their own. In order to defeat that law, Kagan manipulated a report by a panel from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists to fool the Supreme Court into thinking that doctors had supported the idea that it was a medically necessary procedure, when in fact ACOG couldn’t specify a single set of circumstances where it would save the life of the mother:
There is no better example of this distortion of science than the language the United States Supreme Court cited in striking down Nebraska’s ban on partial-birth abortion in 2000. This language purported to come from a “select panel” of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), a supposedly nonpartisan physicians’ group. ACOG declared that the partial-birth-abortion procedure “may be the best or most appropriate procedure in a particular circumstance to save the life or preserve the health of a woman.” The Court relied on the ACOG statement as a key example of medical opinion supporting the abortion method.
Do you think the Republicans’ self-imposed restriction on pork spending will continue?
Washington Times
STEYN: Obama zones out
Search for president’s core uncovers – nothing
By Mark Steyn
6:21 p.m., Friday, June 25, 2010
What do Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal and BP have in common? Aside from the fact that they’re both Democratic Party supporters.
Or they were. Gen. McChrystal is a liberal who voted for President Obama and banned Fox News from his headquarters TV. That may at least partly explain how he became the first U.S. general to be lost in combat while giving an interview to Rolling Stone. They’ll be studying that one in war colleges around the world for decades. The managers of BP were unable to vote for Mr. Obama, being, as we now know, the most sinister, duplicitous bunch of shifty Brits to pitch up offshore since the War of 1812. But, in their “Beyond Petroleum” marketing and beyond, they signed on to every modish nostrum of the eco-left. Their recently retired chairman, Lord John Browne, was one of the most prominent promoters of “cap-and-trade.” BP was the Democrats’ favorite oil company. It was to Mr. Obama what TotalFinaElf was to Saddam Hussein.
(Illustration: Obama shrinks)
Obama’s Dilemma: Heavy Leadership Responsibility – Light Leadership Aptitude
BigGovernment.com
Posted Jun 29th 2010 at 8:37 am
The president’s recent disappointing oval office speech elicited a chorus of criticism from across the political spectrum. For some reason the speech seems to have put a spotlight on the president as a leader, whereas other misjudgments in which he was directly involved in making policy had not. The oil spill, which was certainly no fault of Mr. Obama, seems to have finally caused the public and many of his cheerleaders among the pundits to focus on the president’s substance and not his style. That has been the unspoken, elephant-in- the-room, concern throughout his presidency, his aptitude for leadership. We are reminded of the lead-in lyrics to the signature song Ethel Merman belts out in Gypsy… “Curtain up…light the lights…you either got it…or you ain’t.”
President Obama seems to have the curtain up, light the lights part down pat. The dramatic campaign and convention stage sets, his world photo-op tours, his big oval-office backdrop to his little oval-office speech, and his ever-masterful use of the teleprompter have all produced a “strike-up-the-band” expectation whenever and wherever he appears. It’s the “you either got it, or you ain’t” part that seems finally to have focused the public on the president’s aptitude for leadership.
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