Obama under fire over falling dollar

October 8th, 2009

By Edward Luce and Krishna Guha, Financial Times

The Dollar is plunging amidst more out of control spending

The sharp fall in the US dollar is giving ammunition to the critics of the Obama administration and fuelling broader concerns about the erosion of America’s reserve currency status.

Republican politicians have highlighted the dollar’s slide as evidence of waning US power. On Wednesday, Sarah Palin, the Republican former vice-presidential candidate, added her voice to those who have expressed concern over the consequences of rising US indebtedness and dependence on foreign oil.

“We can see the effect of this in the price of gold, which hit a record high today in response to fears about the weakened dollar,” she wrote on her Facebook site.

Most economists attribute the recent surge in the gold price to the actions of a few speculative investors hedging against inflation fears in the US. And they point out that the far deeper US bond markets show no sign of concern over inflation. Indeed, analysts say that the dollar’s slide stems more from investors’ growing appetite for risk and the prospects of interest rate rises elsewhere.

Over the past six months, the dollar has fallen 11.5 per cent on a trade weighted basis.

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Bachmann voices ire at ‘Bail-out Nation’—Reaction against Barack Obama’s “Bail-out Nation” is provoking the emergence of a coalition of conservatives, libertarians and independents increasingly alarmed over the growth of US national debt and budget deficits,

Bachmann voices ire at ‘Bail-out Nation’

By Edward Luce and Tom Braithwaite in Washington

Published: October 7 2009 19:26 | Last updated: October 7 2009 23:02

Reaction against Barack Obama’s “Bail-out Nation” is provoking the emergence of a coalition of conservatives, libertarians and independents increasingly alarmed over the growth of US national debt and budget deficits, according to Michele Bachmann, a rising rightwing star of the Republican party.

Ms Bachmann, a second-term congresswoman, who played a prominent role in the “town hall” agitations against Mr Obama’s healthcare reform agenda in August, made her comments against the backdrop of sharply falling support for the Democratic party – although Mr Obama’s personal approval rating remains high.

On Wednesday a Gallup poll showed the two parties running almost neck and neck for the first time since 2006 – with the Republicans at 44 per cent and the Democrats at 46 per cent.

The pollster also showed a majority of independents favouring the Republicans over the Democrats – again, reversing the trend of recent years.

“What we are seeing is a real sense of unease among American people and not just Republicans,” Ms Bachmann contended in an interview with the Financial Times.

“Whether it’s the government bail-out of the banking system, or the White House sacking the chief executive officer of General Motors, or the bail-out of AIG, or the level of debt accumulation, more and more people are joining a coalition that is saying this is unconstitutional and un-American.”

Ms Bachmann has been the source of plenty of controversy in recent months.

In August the lawmaker from Minnesota called on opponents of “socialised healthcare” to “pray to God” for Mr Obama to fail. Last year Ms Bachmann, a Christian conservative, provoked memories of the witch hunt days of Joe McCarthy when she called on the media to investigate “un-American” sentiments in Congress.

Ms Bachmann, whose mere name can provoke apoplexy in some liberal quarters, has been less vocal than some of her colleagues in the “birther” debate that questions whether Mr Obama was actually born on US soil.

In the interview she sought to play down social values to stress the coalescence of a new movement, united against further federal government involvement in the economy.

“It remains to be seen what role social values will play in the backlash against Obama,” said Ms Bachmann.

“What I can say is that we are agreed on 70 to 80 per cent of the issues and that it is united around a defence of the constitution. The fabric of this big tent is made up of the very parchment of the constitution.”

Ms Bachmann would not be drawn on whether she would back Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska, as the Republican party’s presidential candidate in 2012.

But she pointed out that Ms Palin’s forthcoming book, Going Rogue, hit number one on Amazon’s bestseller list last week, a month before its release date.

“What did Nancy Pelosi’s [Democratic speaker of the House of Representatives] book sell in the first week? Two thousand, seven hundred copies?” Ms Bachmann asked. “Sarah Palin is a compelling political figure.”

Ms Bachmann’s comments may prove anathema to a dwindling band of moderate Republicans, who are concerned about the party’s supposed abandonment of subtle thinking and of intellectual inquiry, in favour of a more populist Midwestern approach to politics.

But the debate within the Republican party is likely to intensify in the coming months, with a growing number of leading figures already throwing their hats into the ring for 2012.

Tim Pawlenty, the Republican governor of Minnesota, Ms Bachmann’s home state, announced he would attend a political fundraiser in Iowa next month – a sure sign of presidential toe-dipping, since Iowa hosts the first caucus event in the battle for party nominations.

Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, has barely paused for breath since being eliminated by John McCain in last year’s Republican primaries.

Old-fashioned Republicans believe it would be suicidal for the party to embrace a candidate such as Ms Palin. But for the time being the political tide appears to favour populist figures.

“People are beginning to realise that Obama is a socialist,” said Ms Bachmann. “And that is not the way America is.”

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Internet Security in the Age of Obama

By Jake Keller

Internet security is no longer for the paranoid only.  James Lakely recently wrote, here on AT, an article about our New Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski, and his desire to quell the internet.  This was followed by another AT article regarding Obama’s Czar of Chillin’. What we need are methods and means to deal with such threats.  How to hide in plain sight, or encrypt and obscure information.

 

Therefore, to assist fellow patriots in the War on Freedom that is coming out of Washington DC, I propose you begin to construct your own Counterintelligence Tool bag.   This topic is quite broad, and this is not a how-to or treatise, merely something to get you thinking in the right direction.

 

Surfing the Web anonymously

 

It is always good to be able to surf anonymously when one deals with Czarist oppressors, but most “normal” users have no idea how to do this, or even what it means.  Surfing anonymously means you are able to go to sites like this one, with your actual internet address and other information obscured. 

 

I hope you like onions, because one of the most used methods to fix this is called Tor, an “onion router” and fortunately for you, it can run on Windows, Mac OSX, Linux and BSD.  More fortunately, it is a free download.  There is a plugin, a module that you can download for Firefox, that permits you to click a button and deal with Tor from right inside your browser.

 

Don’t like all the hassle of downloading and setting it all up?  Good. I got tired of all of this too, and preferred something more portable, in fact, bootable from a USB “thumb drive.”  This solution may not be for everyone, but worth a look is Incognito, and its companion Rockate.

 

If all this is still too much grief, get out your wallet and get one of the most worthwhile devices you can own, an Ironkey. These devices are not for the careless. If you forget your password, and lock yourself out, they really can’t get you back in, and your data is lost, and the Ironkey becomes unusable.  Ah, but for the faithful AT reader, a great tool in the war against the oppressors!

 

Add a device of your choice from Yoggie, and you’re locked up a lot tighter than most businesses I’ve seen.

 

Email Encryption

 

Why let anyone, especially Obama, read your email? What you need is to be able to encrypt your email!  There are enterprise and complex methods for such things, but PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) or the Open Source Gnu Privacy Guard (GPG) are very robust in this department.

 

For those of you who use the Thunderbird email system, there is a plugin which will handle all your encryption needs, and provides you with control of your encryption system.

 

You can even learn about “port forwarding” – which is where you use a secure tunneling program (ssh -or “secure shell”) to forward connections to your own PC and then securely out to your email server, or to surf the web, etc.  This is covered in O’Reilly’s “Linux Server Hacks” and applies to most ssh programs – many of which are free for download.  Also, for Windows users, “Tunnelier.“

 

Free Wi-Fi

 

Sometimes it is useful for the hapless Conservative to be as sneaky as a street-bum liberal.  Discussion of how to break into someone else’s Wi-Fi connection, is beyond the scope of this article, and unnecessary.

 

What you do need, however, is a way to find a connection should you need one.  There are many corporations which provide such things, as are there local coffee houses and other smaller businesses that provide free Wi-Fi to their customers. All you have to do is keep a list of the ones in your area, or in the area where you will be.  A web search for will locate many sites, this is one of them.

 

Equipped with your laptop, notepad or other smaller computing device, you are now ready to march onward using Tor and your other tricks, from a free connection, that is even more difficult to trace.  Just keep an open eye out for mall and shopping center cameras (I told you, we are acting like paranoid liberals in this section.)

 

Since Ironkey keeps your browsing history and passwords locked up, it is a good tool.  Other methods of leaving fewer or no footprints come from the Linux world.  Most distributions of Linux have built in options for disk encryption.

 

There are several distributions of what is called, “Bootable Distros” for the Linux operating system, that are made to boot from a CD, DVD, or Thumb drive, and capable of running on a large variety of hardware.

 

One of the more popular ones was written by Karl Knopper, and is called Knoppix.  This can be taken along as a CD or DVD and also booted from a thumb drive.  You can customize most of these “distros” and save your information to the thumb drive, so you have your whole “Desktop Environment” in your pocket.

 

Just think! You can visit a friend, boot your own desktop that you carry with you, and when you are done, shutdown / restart -take out your thumb drive, and leave no trace!

 

(Hint: you can do this at home, too!)

 

There are far too many “distros” to list, but I am sure there is one that will suit you, from the simple to the totally well loaded with tools versions. For those of you who like lots of disk space, the OcZ thumbdrives, can reach sizes of 64 Gigabytes.

 

(That’s a lot of computing space in your pocket!)

 

Further reading:

 

Silence on the Wire

Steal This Computer Book 4.0

 

Linux Pro Magazine

 

Linux Format Magazine

 

Hackin9 Magazine

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/10/internet_security_in_the_age_o.html at October 08, 2009 – 09:41:31 AM EDT

Obama’s hogging of credit has plumbed a new low

Ed Lasky
Barack Obama’s ugly habit of claiming credit for the work of others has reached a new level of absurdity. His flacks at the White House are crediting him with the apprehension of terror suspect Najibullah Zazi.  IBD is on the case:

Zazi was reportedly tracked down through the CIA’s discovery of his communications with a high-level al-Qaida contact. But to hear the White House describe it, you’d think a satellite was transmitting real-time video to the Situation Room showing Zazi as he drove across the country.

“Senior officials added the case to Obama’s daily intelligence briefing in the Oval Office,” the Washington Post was told by presidential aides, after which “the case quickly piqued Obama’s curiosity and led to what aides called an intensive three-week White House focus on the case.” ….

… the commander in chief managed to laser in on the Zazi case at a point when the professionals “had only fragmented information about Zazi.”

 

IBD puts this claim into context:

 

Imagine you, or perhaps your father, were one of the five Marines who raised the American flag on Mount Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima in 1945. Then imagine seeing Joe Rosenthal’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of that iconic image.

But then you read the caption below the photo. It says that according to the White House, what those Marines were doing was the result of “President Roosevelt’s deep involvement in the war effort.” The claim is that the Marines only had sketchy information about Iwo Jima, but the president sensed something and held “an intensive three-week White House focus” on the impending attack.

 

Ridiculous and more than a little repulsive.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/10/obamas_hogging_of_credit_has_p.html at October 08, 2009 – 09:35:44 AM EDT

America, You’ve Been Punk’d

By Pedro Primavera

It’s okay to admit it: you thought you were voting for a more benevolent and wiser version of Tiger Woods when all you got was a smoother version of Chicago-style, brass knuckle politics.  It isn’t so much that you voted for the wrong guy; you were lied to by the media. 

But you should have known better.  Chicago has a long and storied run of thoroughly corrupt political bosses giving envy to any third-world dictator.  Barack Obama also ran around with loony-tune communists and wild-eyed radicals including his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, who makes the loosest of cannons seem laser-guided.  Then he tells us absolutely nothing about himself other than what is in his — not one but two — autobiographies. 

 

If you scratch below the surface — not too hard since there isn’t much there — you find a different human being, one entirely at variance with what you find in the media or his autobiographies.  It is a man driven not to overcoming obstacles but stuck on them, still living in his past.  The case of Barack Obama is one of a deep, deep inferiority complex from his childhood and he just seems unable to rise from it. 

 

Looking at BHO from another angle shows the real man.  He was conceived out of wedlock while his mother was in college.  His childhood consisted of a father who abandoned him as an infant — unwanted — and he was raised by another man in another country through many of his formative childhood years.  He didn’t look like his Indonesian adopted father or his white mother in an Asian culture.  As he grows up, he is introduced to marijuana and cocaine.  The people he hangs around with are avowed communists and radicals –strange, hateful people and the ideologues on whom Barack Obama cuts his philosophical teeth.

 

Just out of college, he writes his first autobiography that is filled with errors at best, lies at worst.  He wants the world to see him differently than what he really is.  There is no attachment in his life, and just like Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon before him, the crowd takes the place of a physically or emotionally absent father. 

 

Obama is different, though.  The hate is still brewing inside him.  His only foundation consists of communists who turn his inferiority into narcissism, a common result of an inferiority complex.  He wants to change America and reflect his image.  Now, as president, he can do so with a stroke of the pen or the whim of his will.  He can mete out his vision for America on an unsuspecting public. 

 

Nobody thought in years past a man such as Barack Obama, almost completely inexperienced and un-vetted,  would ever occupy the White House. Surely, the head of the Executive Branch would never abuse the office as he has.  It is all about Barack Obama and his fellow-travelling media. 

 

You were lied to and straight-faced from the beginning.  He was supposed to be the One, but what you got was politics as usual, this time with no inhibitions toward power, a shrewd and crooked power grab. American wanted to believe in a dream of racial reconciliation, so they believed the media-generated images and blocked out warnings from conservatives about Obama’s troubling and troubled past.

 

No wonder BHO apologizes for America.  He is out for revenge, thanks to an inculcation of other self-loathers that surrounded him since he was a boy.  This is a deeply wounded man who will stop at nothing to seek vengeance on a way of life here in America.

 

It’s time to admit it: you were played for a fool.  Surprise, surprise, America, you are waking up to find you’ve been punk’d.