What a schmuck…..
The Obama Bowing Survey
IF Obama bowed to the Saudi King as the picture above indicates and they are rated #4 with the other Oil Exporters for purchasing our Treasuries…..
AND
IF Obama bowed to the Empeoror of Japan as the pictured above indicates and they are rated #2 for purchasing our Treasuries……
THEN WHAT
Did Obama do BEHIND CLOSED DOORS with the Chinese Premier last night since they are the NUMBER 1 buyer of Treasuries?
a. Hugabutt
b. Lewinsky
c. Sent Michelle in
d. Sang “The East is Red” wearing a sarong and high heels to entertain them.
e. All of the above
What a schmuck…..
Bloomberg.com | Rice may double in price - to more than $1,000 a metric ton as dry El Nino weather shrinks output
Nov. 16 (Bloomberg) -- Rice prices have nowhere to go but up as drought in India and cyclones in the Philippines cripple harvests, according to the world’s biggest importer and the top exporter. Rice may double to more than $1,000 a metric ton as dry El Nino weather shrinks output and the Philippines and India boost imports, said Sarunyu Jeamsinkul, the deputy managing director at Asia Golden Rice Ltd. in Thailand, the largest exporting nation. Prices won’t peak until March, said Rex Estoperez, a spokesman for the National Food Authority of the Philippines, the biggest importer. The agency issued a record tender for 600,000 tons last week and today called for bids for the same volume on Dec. 8 to secure grain before prices rise.
Global rice supplies are likely to be tighter than last year, when food shortages sparked riots from Haiti to Egypt, said Jeremy Zwinger, president of The Rice Trader, a brokerage and consulting company in Chico, California. Escalating food prices threaten to spark unrest in developing nations while increasing costs for beer brewer Anheuser-Busch Cos., the biggest U.S. rice buyer, and cereal maker Kellogg Co.
Asia Times - China | Welcome, comrade Maobama
European Voice | Obama, 'America's first Pacific president'?
16.11.2009 / 08:32 CETIs Asia higher up the US's hierarchy of priorities than Europe?For better or worse, President Barack Obama's absence at the celebrations of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and, days later, his departure for a tour of Asia is being seen as a sign that he is turning the US's back on Europe.
Does this mean Europe no longer matters so much for the United States? Is it an intentional slight? Is there a deeper significance?
Similar questions were asked when US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was in Berlin on 9 November in Obama's stead, chose to make Asia the destination of the first foreign trip of her tenure some nine months ago.
AP | Millions will have to repay part of tax credit
WASHINGTON — More than 15 million taxpayers could unexpectedly owe taxes when they file their federal returns next spring because the government was too generous with their new Making Work Pay tax credit.
Taxpayers are at risk if they have more than one job, are married and both spouses work, or receive Social Security benefits while also earning taxable wages, according to a report Monday by the Treasury Department's inspector general for tax administration.
The tax credit, which is supposed to pay individuals up to $400 and couples up to $800, was President Barack Obama's signature tax break in the massive stimulus package enacted in February.
Most workers started receiving the credit through small increases in their paychecks in April. The tax credit was made available through new withholding tables issued by the Internal Revenue Service.
The withholding tables, however do not take into account taxpayers with multiple jobs or married couples in which both people work. They also don't take into account Social Security recipients with jobs that provided taxable income.
The Social Security Administration sent out $250 payments to more than 50 million retirees in the spring as part of the economic stimulus package. The payments were meant to provide a boost for people who didn't' qualify for the tax credit.
However, they went to many retirees who also received the credit. Those retirees will have the $250 payment deducted from their tax credit — but not until they file their tax returns next year, long after the money may have been spent.
"While implementing a credit through reduced withholding is an effective way to provide economic stimulus evenly throughout the year, it is difficult to account for everyone's circumstances," said J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration. "More than 10 percent of all taxpayers who file individual tax returns for 2009 could owe additional taxes."
The tax credit is also available for 2010. Russell said the problems will continue in 2010 if they are not resolved.
The credit pays workers 6.2 percent of their earned income, up to a maximum of $400 for individuals and $800 for married couples who file jointly. Individuals making more than $95,000 and couples making more than $190,000 are ineligible.
"Making Work Pay was designed to deliver much needed boosts to the paychecks of 95 percent of all working Americans," said Nayyera Haq, a Treasury Department spokeswoman. "Since enactment, more than 110 million families have benefited from as much as $60 in additional take home pay each month to put toward their family budgets, serving as a steady boost to spending and consumption."
For many, the new tax tables will simply mean smaller-than-expected tax refunds next year. The average tax refund this year was about $2,800.
The IRS, in a response to the audit, advised taxpayers to check their withholding throughout the year to make sure they don't get hit with an unexpected tax bill.
"The withholding system must approximate the tax liability of tens of millions of Americans, and therefore, cannot be tailored precisely to fit every individual situation," Richard Byrd Jr., commissioner of the IRS' wage and investments division, wrote in the agency's response to the report.
Russian cruise ship icebound in Antarctica
CAPE TOWN, South Africa, Nov. 16 (UPI) -- A Russian cruise ship with 105 passengers aboard is stuck in the ice near Antarctica, shipping sources said.
The Merco Press said Monday that the Captain Khlebnikov did not appear to be in any immediate danger but also wasn't moving.
The ship's passengers were mainly British and included a BBC film crew.
The Captain Khlebnikov was built as an icebreaker in 1981 and was converted to a passenger vessel by the Far East Shipping Co. in 1990. The ship specializes in cruises to the Antarctic.
Click to watch video on news website:
Jersey Shore declares emergency
LA Times | 3.6 earthquake hits Riverside County (California) area, Southland's third in a day
The temblor did not cause any damage, though it was felt in parts of the Inland Empire. It hit near the small town of Anza in southwestern Riverside County.
It was the third moderate quake to hit Southern California in the last 24 hours. A 4.3 temblor hit off San Nicholas Island Sunday afternoon, followed by a 3.6 aftershock.
Neither of those quakes caused damage or injuries.
RELATED:
| MAG | UTC DATE-TIME y/m/d h:m:s | LAT deg | LON deg | DEPTH km | Region | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MAP | 3.6 | 2009/11/16 13:54:33 | 33.415 | -116.642 | 5.1 | SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA |
| MAP | 2.6 | 2009/11/16 01:34:33 | 37.458 | -118.840 | 7.7 | CENTRAL CALIFORNIA |
| MAP | 3.6 | 2009/11/15 22:48:37 | 33.172 | -119.302 | 6.0 | CHANNEL ISLANDS REGION, CALIFORNIA |
| MAP | 4.4 | 2009/11/15 22:45:27 | 33.166 | -119.302 | 6.0 | CHANNEL ISLANDS REGION, CALIFORNIA |
| MAP | 3.3 | 2009/11/15 07:54:22 | 33.915 | -117.055 | 9.6 | SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA |
| MAP | 3.2 | 2009/11/13 13:22:37 | 38.992 | -111.392 | 0.5 | UTAH |
| MAP | 3.3 | 2009/11/13 10:11:37 | 34.164 | -117.427 | 5.5 | GREATER LOS ANGELES AREA, CALIFORNIA |
| MAP | 2.9 | 2009/11/12 07:41:05 | 33.839 | -116.844 | 14.9 | SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA |
| MAP | 2.5 | 2009/11/11 05:56:41 | 35.427 | -116.762 | 5.0 | SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA |
| MAP | 3.6 | 2009/11/11 03:24:23 | 33.248 | -116.052 | 3.9 | SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA |
| MAP | 2.8 | 2009/11/09 20:35:16 | 34.693 | -116.302 | 5.5 | SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA |
WAFF.com | Small earthquake hits Fort Payne, Alabama today Monday, November 16, 2009
November 16, 2009 - FORT PAYNE, AL (WAFF) - A small earthquake struck Northeast Alabama before dawn Monday morning according to the United States Geological Survey.
The 1.4 magnitude earthquake hit about five miles east of Fort Payne in DeKalb County.
A receptionist at Fort Payne City Hall says she felt something similar to a work by a construction company doing some blasting.
Joann Brewer also says she noticed some papers and other items in the office had been moved and knocked off a desk. Another woman said she thought the shaking was just a dream.
Neither Fort Payne police nor the DeKalb County EMA had any public reports from anyone claiming to have felt the small quake.
It was smallest of 11 earthquakes registered in Alabama this year.
The biggest earthquake ever registered struck Alabama in 1916. It was a magnitude 5.1 quake.
RELATED:
http://folkworm.ceri.memphis.edu/recenteqs/Quakes/quakes0.html
MAG DATE LOCAL-TIME LAT LON DEPTH LOCATION
y/m/d h:m:s deg deg km
map 2.5 2009/11/16 05:12:37 35.493N 97.230W 5.0 16 km (10 mi) ENE of Midwest City, OK
map 1.4 2009/11/16 03:59:33 34.470N 85.618W 12.5 10 km ( 6 mi) ENE of Fort Payne, AL
map 1.3 2009/11/15 22:28:53 36.141N 89.385W 7.0 11 km ( 7 mi) WNW of Newbern, TN
MAP 3.0 2009/11/14 05:13:01 35.524N 97.219W 5.0 18 km (11 mi) ENE of Midwest City, OK
map 1.2 2009/11/13 23:31:38 36.482N 89.537W 7.9 12 km ( 7 mi) S of New Madrid, MO
map 0.9 2009/11/13 04:51:57 36.257N 89.486W 7.5 1 km ( 0 mi) S of Ridgely, TN Military needs more satellites
Daily Finance | Obama's leverage in China negotiations limited by massive U.S. debt
Nov 16th 2009 at 10:00AM - President Barack Obama will work hard to build trust with China during his trip there, but how far will he be able to go in seeking changes on the key issues -- currency, the trade surplus, North Korea, Iran, human rights and others -- when he's sitting down with his nation's largest creditor? China holds $800 billion in U.S. debt and gets $50 billion a year in interest.With that level of U.S. debt in its hands, China holds most of the cards. If China started dumping that debt, the value of the U.S. dollar would fall dramatically. China knows it's in the stronger position, as evidenced by its recent decision to ignore the IMF as it continues its stimulus programs. So no matter who was sitting at the table representing the U.S., they wouldn't have much ability to move the Chinese.China flexed its muscles almost as soon as President Obama arrived. Obama held a town hall meeting for more than 400 Chinese university students, which was supposed to have been televised. But at the last minute, China pulled the plug and the event was not carried on state television. Further, to make the statement that it's not interested in discussing human rights, China rounded up dissidents before Obama's arrival. Clearly, China is sending the signal that human rights will not be one of the issues to be negotiated. FULL STORY
Seeking Alpha | Who's Watching the FDIC?
November 16, 2009 - .... Yet, the FDIC’s loan guarantees are probably worse than the TARP capital injections. TARP was passed by Congress and signed by the President. What Congressional or Presidential authority did the FDIC have to get into the credit default swap business? The Congressional Oversight Panel (COP) stated in its November 2009 report estimates on page 69 (71) that the FDIC’s loan guarantee program amounted to a $13.4 billion to $28.9 billion subsidy to the banks. The impact of this subsidy is that banks such as Goldman Sachs (GS) and Morgan Stanley (MS), which may have received subsidies of $2.3 billion and $3.7 billion under that program, will be encouraged to be over-reliant on the short-term, repo financing that brought down Lehman Brothers and Bear Sterns. If short-term creditors get nervous, the FDIC or the Federal Reserve will step in through discount window loans and bail them out.
For all its problems, the U.S. Treasury has been much more transparent in its efforts to shore up the financial system. It publishes term sheets and contracts in a timely manner. Not so with the FDIC. The FDIC is flaunting the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by not disclosing basic details of the loan guarantees and lines of credit that have granted a group of hedge fund and private equity investors that bought the failed assets of Corus Bank. My research shows that these loan guarantees inflate asset prices, yet the cheap loans may not hurt taxpayers and the deposit insurance fund if the toxic asset sales are from failed banks.
Perhaps more questions need to be asked of the FDIC. So far it has been clever in avoiding the bailout tag, but it has been and still is an active participant in bank bailouts. FULL STORYSteveQuayle.com | Hot Headlines - November 16, 2009
Ukraine Advanced Bioweapon Outbreak Update
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Poor Man's Gold May be an Investor's Treasure
Gld ETF Warning, Tungsten Filled Fake Gold Bars
Gerald Celente – American Public Losing Everything to Fascist Oligarchs
Economic Uncertainty Means Business Is Booming for Swiss Gold Smelters
China-U.S. Discord on Currencies Clouds Obama Visit
Farmers Scramble to Finish Harvest from Hell
Rice Prices Poised to Skyrocket, Disasters Destroy Global Crops
Food Emergency: 20 Million on the Verge of Starvation as the World Teeters on the Brink of a Global Famine
Mayon's Crater Glow Grows More Intense
Eurasia Highest Volcano Spills Lava Down Slope
Italian MP Denounces Bilderberg Influence During European Parliament Meeting
Jeff Nyquist Talks to Dariusz Rohnka
Leaked G20 Documents Shed Light on Global Carbon Tax
Darpa: Freeze Soldiers to Save Injured Brains
Wake from Cryonics
Synthetic Biology: Why Not Pursuing Crazy Biotech Is Dangerous
Join Steve Quayle with George Noory on Coast to Coast AM Monday Nov. 16, 10 pm PT
The Public Record | President Obama: Don’t Lecture China on Censorship
In an unprecedented town hall in Shanghai, the President takes questions on the most pivotal issues in U.S.-China relations directly from students and via the internet. November 16, 2009 - President Obama, in his visit to China, held a “town meeting” with Chinese students in which he praised openness and lectured them on the value of freedom of information, saying that he is a “supporter of non-censorship” and that open access to information was a “source of strength.”
And yet America is hardly free of censorship. Heck, the president himself has gone to court to prevent the release of photographs of US troops torturing captives in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo. Talk about censorship! But it goes way beyond just such crude, totalitarian style control over information.
Let’s just take the issue of depleted uranium weapons, over 1000 tons of which have been expended in the US invasion of Iraq, most of it in populated areas where millions remain exposed to the radioactive dust of the burned material. There is almost no reporting on this topic in the US media. The Pentagon has for years lied about and hidden the effects of this deadly substance, used in shells, bombs and bullets because of its unique ability to penetrate hard steel armor and concrete bunker walls.
It has refused to disclose where the weapons were fired, and has denied US troops the tests that would show if they have been contaminated. It has even resorted to having paid Pentagon hacks surreptitiously libel, slander and otherwise undermine those military sources and journalists who have tried to expose this scourge (this reporter has been the target of such disinformation attacks).
But censorship in the US goes beyond these crude efforts at government-directed control of information. In America, some of the most potent censorship is done by the privately owned media—supposedly a bastion of freedom of expression.
There is no reason why the US media cannot report on depleted uranium and its deadly legacy in places where it has been used, such as Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Kosovo, or on and around American military bases from Maryland to Hawaii. And yet it does not. Just recently, stories have appeared both on Britain’s SkyTV and in the Guardian newspaper, reporting on an alarming rise in unusual birth defects and infant cancers in Fallujah as well as in other Iraqi cities like Basra, Najaf, Baghdad and Samara—all urban areas where there were major assaults by US forces both in the initial invasion, when most of the DU weapons were used, and later during fights against holed-up insurgent groups.
In Fallujah, the Guardian reports that birth defects are up by a staggering 15 times normal—an increase of 1400%! While the article doesn’t mention depleted uranium specifically, and says that doctors in Fallujah have been reluctant to attribute the astonishing number of birth defects to the massive assault on that city by US forces in late 2004, they do cite “radiation and chemicals” which were dumped on the city.
There is no such report about this in the US media.
Is that censorship? Of course it is.
The American government doesn’t tell CBS News or CNN not to report this story, which amounts to a US war crime. It does not (at least generally), contact the editors at the New York Times or the Washington Post and say, “Don’t report on the infant mortality crisis in Iraq, or on the possible connection to US weaponry.” The editors of those news organizations themselves simply decide that either the story is of no importance to readers or they worry that they may be criticized either by the government or by other media organizations for being unpatriotic, or biased.
The end result of such a process, however, is that the American public is as ignorant about certain things as someone in China.
More ignorant in fact.
One thing I learned from living and working as a journalist and journalism teacher in China back in the 1990s is that the Chinese people, with their long experience of living in a totalitarian dictatorship in which all media are owned and tightly controlled by the state and the ruling Communist Party, are acutely aware that they are being lied to and that the truth is being hidden from them. Accordingly, they have learned to read between the lines, to pick up subtle hints in news articles which honest journalists have learned how to slip into their carefully controlled reports. They have also developed a sophisticated private system of person-to-person reporting called xiaodao xiaoxi or, literally, “back-alley news.”
This system used to be word-of-mouth between neighbors and friends. As telephones became ubiquitous, it was done by phone, allowing transmission over long distances quickly. Now there is the internet, which, while it is systematically controlled via what has become known as China’s “Great Firewall”—effectively all of China is like a vast corporate “intranet” which blocks access to outside websites—still allows the flow of email. This is nearly impossible to monitor, particularly when the messages are not bulk mailed to large numbers of addressees.
So in China, reports of corruption, of local rebellions or strikes, or of important news about the outside world that the government wants to keep at bay, manage to circulate widely inside China despite a huge state censorship apparatus.
It works because the Chinese people know they are being lied to and kept in the dark, and they want to break through that official shroud of secrecy and control.
In the US, in contrast, we have a public that for the most part is blissfully unaware of the extent to which our news is being censored, filtered and controlled. We boast of our “free press,” and our open society, and indeed, as a journalist, I am free to write what I want to write.
But given that most people get their news either from corporately owned newspapers or from corporate radio and TV stations, it doesn’t really matter what I or other journalists critical of the Establishment write because it won’t appear in the corporate media. Since most Americans, unlike most Chinese people, assume that they live in a society with a free press and no censorship or control of information, they don’t even bother to look beyond the information that is spoon-fed to them by corporate media sources.
The result is that in my experience I have found peasants in rural Jiangsu or Anhwei Province to in many cases be better informed about their own country and the world than are typical American suburbanites. Certainly if an American wants to be informed, all the information you could want is available, but you have to be first of all aware that you aren’t getting certain information via the obvious sources, and then you have to want to get it, and make the effort to find it. For most Americans, all three of these elements are missing.
The list of censored stories and issues in the US, about which the American public knows almost nothing is staggering, going well beyond just the use of nasty weapons.
Do Americans know that all the other modern western Democracies in the world have some form of national health care—either a state-run system like that in the UK or a single-payer model like that in Canada, or some hybrid like they have in France or Switzerland—and that in all those countries, the systems are so popular that they have survived decades of conservative governments? No. Our corporate media instead report on the crank critics of those systems and allow us to believe they are hated by their citizens.
Do Americans know that the US no longer boasts the best standard of living in the world—or even close? No. Because the American media continue to portray the US as “number one.”
Do Americans know that Al Qaeda was actually a creation of the CIA? No. This important bit of information doesn’t get mentioned in the US media, which always starts the organization’s history at 1988, when it got its name, when actually, its early origins date to the arming of the mujahadeen by the CIA and the CIA-linked Pakistani intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the US wanted to create and support resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
And of course, we rarely get to see the slaughter of women and children that our beloved soldier “heroes” are conducting in Iraq and Afghanistan in our name.
No censorship in America?
Mr. President, please. You may fool us, but at least don’t insult the intelligence of your Chinese audience.
Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net
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Native American Times | Headlines - November 16, 2009
Obama: US must reverse course with IndiansWASHINGTON (AP) – President Barack Obama assured American Indians last Thursday that they have a place in his White House and on his agenda, telling tribal leaders their marginalized community deserves more from its government.
Tribes claim wind farm would destroy sacred ritual MASHPEE, Mass.
(AP) – From a blustery perch over a Cape Cod beach, Chuckie Green gestures toward a stretch of horizon where he says construction of the nation’s first offshore wind farm would destroy his Indian tribe’s religion.
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Indian political awakening stirs Latin America
JESUS DE MACHACA, Bolivia (AP) – In Ecuador, the Shuar are blocking highways to defend their hunting grounds. In Chile, the Mapuche are occupying ranches to pressure for land, schools and clinics. In Bolivia, a new constitution gives the country’s 36 indigenous peoples the right to self-rule.
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ABC News Exclusive: Obama Admin Slashed 60,000 Jobs From Recent Stimulus Report
Office of Management & Budget Document: 12 Stimulus Recipients Reported 'Unrealistic Job Data'
November 16, 2009 -The Obama administration, under fire for inflating job growth from the $787 billion stimulus plan, slashed over 60,000 jobs from its most recent report on the program because the reporting outlets had submitted "unrealistic data," according to a document obtained by ABC News.
The Office of Management and Budget document shows that before an Oct. 30 progress report on the program the administration asked the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board to remove information from 12 stimulus recipients that contained "unrealistic data," including "unrealistic job data." (Read the document here.)
One recipient – Talladega County of Alabama – claimed that 5,000 jobs had been saved or created from only $42,000 in stimulus funds. FULL STORY
My news blog: The CavePublished Version of my News Updates: Surviving the Revolution and Earthchanges
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