Friday, January 18, 2013
Obama has U.S. on 'road to bankruptcy'
President Obama wants a clean hike in the debt ceiling and insists he is doing substantial work to reduce our debt and deficits. But both of those ideas are pure fantasy, according to one of the top Republicans on the House Budget Committee.
Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga., is vice chairman of the House Budget Committee and a member of the House Ways and Means Committee. He told WND while Obama is correct that a debt-ceiling hike is in response to existing expenses, there’s no reason our massive deficits have to continue.
“Just because there are programs that continue spending under current law forever and ever, that doesn’t mean they have to continue forever and ever,” Price said. “In fact, if we stay on the current course, they will go bankrupt. Medicare is on the road to bankruptcy under this president. Medicaid is on the road to bankruptcy under this president. Social Security is on the road to bankruptcy under this president. So we absolutely must reform these programs so we save them and strengthen them and secure them for those who need them in our society and for this generation and for future generations.”
Price also categorically rejects Obama’s assertion that his administration has taken great strides in cutting spending over the past four years.
“All you’ve got to do is look at the numbers and appreciate that that is not the case,” Price said. “This is an administration that has been in charge when we’ve had the largest increase in absolute debt to our nation in a four-year period of time ever, $4 trillion-plus deficits for each of the four years that he’s been in office. And his budget continues that process.”
“There are wonderful, positive solutions. That’s what we’ll be putting forward in our budget,” he said. “That’s what we’ll be embracing. We hope that the president and his people recognize there are positive reforms that need to be put into place to get this economy rolling again.”
According to Price, there are all sorts of accounting gimmicks involved in Obama’s claims of responsible spending.
“Some of it is reductions in the slope of growth. Some of it is actually fictitious or double counting,” said Price. “For example, the Budget Control Act of 2011 had $1.2 trillion in spending reductions through the sequester. He wants to count that $1.2 trillion again. That’s not the way this works.”
On Monday, President Obama asserted that Social Security payments and veterans benefits would not be sent out if Congress fails to lift the debt ceiling. Price said that is also patently false.
“We won’t allow that to happen, but we also believe there is an appropriate prioritization of spending in this country that ought to occur,” added Price, who says the House GOP will pass a prioritization plan should the debt ceiling not be raised. He said military pay, avoiding default by paying interest on the debt and benefits for seniors will be at the top of that list.
Price also echoed other GOP lawmakers in saying there is much greater resolve among Republicans to demand real reforms and spending cuts for any hike in the debt ceiling.
Obama has also once again failed to present his proposed budget to Congress by the deadline required by law. Price says this is no small detail.
“The law requires that the Congress pass a budget by April 15. In order for that to happen, the law also requires that the president submit his budget by a date certain at the end of January,” said Price.
“In this case, the president is not going to meet that deadline once again. Now the reason that’s important is that the Congress doesn’t work their budget off the assumptions that the president uses.
We move through the Congressional Budget Office, and it takes time. So the further the president backs that up, the more difficult it is for Congress to meet it’s budgetary deadline, understanding that we are very hopeful that the Senate will actually adopt a budget this year, which they haven’t done for the past four years.”
“On the House side, we’ve adopted a budget the last two years that has gotten on a path to balance and actually paying off the debt,” Price said. “We will do that again. We challenge our Senate colleagues to do the same.”
Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga., is vice chairman of the House Budget Committee and a member of the House Ways and Means Committee. He told WND while Obama is correct that a debt-ceiling hike is in response to existing expenses, there’s no reason our massive deficits have to continue.
“Just because there are programs that continue spending under current law forever and ever, that doesn’t mean they have to continue forever and ever,” Price said. “In fact, if we stay on the current course, they will go bankrupt. Medicare is on the road to bankruptcy under this president. Medicaid is on the road to bankruptcy under this president. Social Security is on the road to bankruptcy under this president. So we absolutely must reform these programs so we save them and strengthen them and secure them for those who need them in our society and for this generation and for future generations.”
Price also categorically rejects Obama’s assertion that his administration has taken great strides in cutting spending over the past four years.
“All you’ve got to do is look at the numbers and appreciate that that is not the case,” Price said. “This is an administration that has been in charge when we’ve had the largest increase in absolute debt to our nation in a four-year period of time ever, $4 trillion-plus deficits for each of the four years that he’s been in office. And his budget continues that process.”
“There are wonderful, positive solutions. That’s what we’ll be putting forward in our budget,” he said. “That’s what we’ll be embracing. We hope that the president and his people recognize there are positive reforms that need to be put into place to get this economy rolling again.”
According to Price, there are all sorts of accounting gimmicks involved in Obama’s claims of responsible spending.
“Some of it is reductions in the slope of growth. Some of it is actually fictitious or double counting,” said Price. “For example, the Budget Control Act of 2011 had $1.2 trillion in spending reductions through the sequester. He wants to count that $1.2 trillion again. That’s not the way this works.”
On Monday, President Obama asserted that Social Security payments and veterans benefits would not be sent out if Congress fails to lift the debt ceiling. Price said that is also patently false.
“We won’t allow that to happen, but we also believe there is an appropriate prioritization of spending in this country that ought to occur,” added Price, who says the House GOP will pass a prioritization plan should the debt ceiling not be raised. He said military pay, avoiding default by paying interest on the debt and benefits for seniors will be at the top of that list.
Price also echoed other GOP lawmakers in saying there is much greater resolve among Republicans to demand real reforms and spending cuts for any hike in the debt ceiling.
Obama has also once again failed to present his proposed budget to Congress by the deadline required by law. Price says this is no small detail.
“The law requires that the Congress pass a budget by April 15. In order for that to happen, the law also requires that the president submit his budget by a date certain at the end of January,” said Price.
“In this case, the president is not going to meet that deadline once again. Now the reason that’s important is that the Congress doesn’t work their budget off the assumptions that the president uses.
We move through the Congressional Budget Office, and it takes time. So the further the president backs that up, the more difficult it is for Congress to meet it’s budgetary deadline, understanding that we are very hopeful that the Senate will actually adopt a budget this year, which they haven’t done for the past four years.”
“On the House side, we’ve adopted a budget the last two years that has gotten on a path to balance and actually paying off the debt,” Price said. “We will do that again. We challenge our Senate colleagues to do the same.”
Guys, there is too much going on with the DNA stuff...What are they up to? Web Hunt for DNA Sequences Leaves Privacy Compromised
The researcher did not reveal the names of the people he found, but the exercise, published Thursday in the journal Science, illustrates the difficulty of protecting the privacy of volunteers involved in medical research when the genetic information they provide needs to be public so scientists can use it.
Other reports have identified people whose genetic data was online, but none had done so using such limited information: the long strings of DNA letters, an age and, because the study focused on only American subjects, a state.
“I’ve been worried about this for a long time,” said Barbara Koenig, a researcher at the University of California in San Francisco who studies issues involving genetic data. “We always should be operating on the assumption that this is possible.”
The data are from an international study, the 1000 Genomes Project, that is collecting genetic information from people around the world and posting it online so researchers can use it freely. It also includes the ages of participants and the regions where they live. That information, a genealogy Web site and Google searches were sufficient to find complete family trees. While the methods for extracting relevant genetic data from the raw genetic sequence files were specialized enough to be beyond the scope of most laypeople, no one expected it to be so easy to zoom in on individuals.
“We are in what I call an awareness moment,” said Eric D. Green, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health.
There is no easy answer about what to do to protect the privacy of study subjects. Subjects might be made more aware that they could be identified by their DNA sequences. More data could be locked behind security walls, or severe penalties could be instituted for those who invade the privacy of subjects.
“We don’t have any claim to have the answer,” Dr. Green said. And opinions about just what should be done vary greatly among experts.
But after seeing how easy it was to find the individuals and their extended families, the N.I.H. removed people’s ages from the public database, making it more difficult to identify them.
But Dr. Jeffrey R. Botkin, associate vice president for research integrity at the University of Utah, which collected the genetic information of some research participants whose identities were breached, cautioned about overreacting. Genetic data from hundreds of thousands of people have been freely available online, he said, yet there has not been a single report of someone being illicitly identified. He added that “it is hard to imagine what would motivate anyone to undertake this sort of privacy attack in the real world.” But he said he had serious concerns about publishing a formula to breach subjects’ privacy. By publishing, he said, the investigators “exacerbate the very risks they are concerned about.”
The project was the inspiration of Yaniv Erlich, a human genetics researcher at the Whitehead Institute, which is affiliated with M.I.T. He stresses that he is a strong advocate of data sharing and that he would hate to see genomic data locked up. But when his lab developed a new technique, he realized he had the tools to probe a DNA database. And he could not resist trying.
The tool allowed him to quickly find a type of DNA pattern that looks like stutters among billions of chemical letters in human DNA. Those little stutters — short tandem repeats — are inherited.
Genealogy Web sites use repeats on the Y chromosome, the one unique to men, to identify men by their surnames, an indicator of ancestry. Any man can submit the short tandem repeats on his Y chromosome and find the surname of men with the same DNA pattern. The sites enable men to find their ancestors and relatives.
So, Dr. Erlich asked, could he take a man’s entire DNA sequence, pick out the short tandem repeats on his Y chromosome, search a genealogy site, discover the man’s surname and then fully identify the man?
He tested it with the genome of Craig Venter, a DNA sequencing pioneer who posted his own DNA sequence on the Web. He knew Dr. Venter’s age and the state where he lives. Bingo: two men popped up in the database. One was Craig Venter.
“Out of 300 million people in the United States, we got it down to two people,” Dr. Erlich said.
He and his colleagues calculated they would be able to identify, from just their DNA sequences, the last names of approximately 12 percent of middle class and wealthier white men — the population that tends to submit DNA data to recreational sites like the genealogical ones. Then by combining the men’s last names with their ages and the states where they lived, the researchers should be able to narrow their search to just a few likely individuals.
Now for the big test. On the Web and publicly available are DNA sequences from subjects in the 1000 Genomes Project. People’s ages were included and all the Americans lived in Utah, so the researchers knew their state.
Dr. Erlich began with one man from the database. He got the Y chromosome’s short tandem repeats and then went to genealogy databases and searched for men with those same repeats. He got surnames of the paternal and maternal grandfather. Then he did a Google search for those people and found an obituary. That gave him the family tree.
“Now I knew the whole family,” Dr. Erlich said. And it was so simple, so fast.
“I said, ‘Come on, that can’t be true.’” So he probed and searched and checked again and again.
“Oh my God, we really did this,” Dr. Erlich said. “I had to digest it. We had so much information.”
He and his colleagues went on to get detailed family trees for other subjects and then visited Dr. Green and his colleagues at the N.I.H. to tell them what they had done.
They were referred to Amy L. McGuire, a lawyer and ethicist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. She, like others, called for more public discussion of the situation.
“To have the illusion you can fully protect privacy or make data anonymous is no longer a sustainable position,” Dr. McGuire said.
When the subjects in the 1000 Genomes Project agreed to participate and provide DNA, they signed a form saying that the researchers could not guarantee their privacy. But, at the time, it seemed like so much boilerplate. The risk, Dr. Green said, seemed “remote.”
“I don’t know that anyone anticipated that someone would go and actually figure out who some of those people were,” Dr. McGuire said.
In the name of the "CHILDREN" Cuomo (NY Governor) banned guns but you can murder children as long as they are inside the womb! Cuomo to make NYC world's 3rd-trimester-abortion capital!
(National Catholic Register) New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is flexing his political muscle to give abortion advocates their biggest state victory in 40 years since Roe v. Wade: a sweeping expansion of abortion law that, if enforced, would put Catholic hospitals and many state-funded ministries out of business.
Cuomo’s approval ratings have topped 70% for six straight months, and, with just two years in office, he has already pushed through controversial same-sex “marriage” legislation and the most restrictive gun-control law in the nation.
Cuomo, who is Catholic, now is setting his sights on succeeding where governors for the past six years have failed: passing the proposed Reproductive Health Care Act.
Cuomo’s approval ratings have topped 70% for six straight months, and, with just two years in office, he has already pushed through controversial same-sex “marriage” legislation and the most restrictive gun-control law in the nation.
Cuomo, who is Catholic, now is setting his sights on succeeding where governors for the past six years have failed: passing the proposed Reproductive Health Care Act.
Future for U.S.? 13% see dictator
One in seven Americans believes that the nation eventually will be ruled by a dictator, and another one in five says it eventually will break up into several sovereign regions, according to a new poll reflecting the dark shadow the country is facing.
Others believe a new “democracy” will arise from the ashes of the current republican form of government.
The results are from a telephone poll conducted for WND by the public-opinion research and media consulting company Wenzel Strategies. It was taken Jan. 9-12 and carries a margin of error of plus or minus 3.22 percentage points.
Asked to speculate on what would happen to the U.S. after a hypothetical failure of the current government, a plurality said they think some new sort of democracy would emerge.
Another 20 percent said they think the existing states would form into several different countries, based either on region or philosophical commonalities.
Just 13 percent said they think a dictator would rise to control.
But Fritz Wenzel, president of the polling organization, pointed out that than a third of the respondents said they were unsure what might happen, “an indication that this type of question is beyond what they conceive could ever happen.”
Those who identified themselves as “very liberal,” whose philosophies align most closely with those who now control Washington, were much more optimistic than the average. In that group, only 15 percent said it was likely that the nation would collapse during the next 10 years.
On the other end of the scale, 50 percent of those who are “very conservative” expressed that opinion.
On the fundamental question of expectations for a national implosion, more than 40 percent of the “liberals” said a new democracy would emerge. But only 21 percent of the “very conservative” agreed.
A full 42 percent of the respondents said they expect the nation to collapse in their lifetimes, based on the federal debt and “bloated” and “dysfunctional bureaucracy” that runs Washington.
Only 31 percent thought that very unlikely.
Thirty-eight percent said they expect a collapse within the next 20 years, and 27 percent believe it will happen during the next decade.
“No government lasts forever, and this survey shows that 42 percent believe it is likely the federal government is so badly in debt and is so dysfunctional and is so threatened by foreign enemies that it will collapse sometime during their lifetime,” Wenzel said.
“Just 51 percent said such a thing is unlikely during their lifetime, a remarkably low percentage given that we are talking about the collapse of the longest-running democratic republic in the history of the world. The guess among respondents appears to be that the collapse will occur in about 20 years, as 41 percent said as much. Just 27 percent said they think the country will collapse in the next 10 years.”
He found it “remarkable” that one in four Americans thinks the country is in its last decade of existence.
In related results, Wenzel earlier revealed that the seeds of tyranny already are present in America, with a heavily armed law enforcement presence and a population holding a disbelief that their government could do anything that would make them want to revolt.
Who Says You Can Kill Americans, Mr. President?
PRESIDENT OBAMA has refused to tell Congress or the American people why he believes the Constitution gives, or fails to deny, him the authority to secretly target and kill American citizens who he suspects are involved in terrorist activities overseas. So far he has killed three that we know of.
Presidents had never before, to our knowledge, targeted specific Americans for military strikes. There are no court decisions that tell us if he is acting lawfully. Mr. Obama tells us not to worry, though, because his lawyers say it is fine, because experts guide the decisions and because his advisers have set up a careful process to help him decide whom he should kill.
He must think we should be relieved.
The three Americans known to have been killed, in two drone strikes in Yemen in the fall of 2011, are Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical Muslim cleric who was born in New Mexico; Samir Khan, a naturalized American citizen who had lived in New York and North Carolina, and was killed alongside Mr. Awlaki; and, in a strike two weeks later, Mr. Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, who was born in Colorado.
Most of us think these people were probably terrorists anyway. So the president’s reassurances have been enough to keep criticism at an acceptable level for the White House. Democrats in Congress and in the press have only gingerly questioned the claims by a Democratic president that he is right about the law and careful when he orders drone attacks on our citizens. And Republicans, who favor aggressive national security powers for the executive branch, look forward to the day when one of their own can wield them again.
But a few of our representatives have spoken up — sort of. Several months ago, Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, began limply requesting the Department of Justice memorandums that justify the targeted killing program. At a committee hearing, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., reminded of the request, demurred and shared a rueful chuckle with the senator. Mr. Leahy did not want to be rude, it seems — though some of us remember him being harder on former President George W. Bush’s attorney general, Alberto R. Gonzales, in 2005.
So, even though Congress has the absolute power under the Constitution to receive these documents, the Democratic-controlled Senate has not fought this president to get them. If the senators did, and the president held fast to his refusal, they could go to court and demand them, and I believe they would win. Perhaps even better, they could skip getting the legal memos and go right to the meat of the matter — using oversight and perhaps legislating to control the president’s killing powers. That isn’t happening either.
Thank goodness we have another branch of government to step into the fray. It is the job of the federal courts to interpret the Constitution and laws, and thus to define the boundaries of the powers of the branches of government, including their own.
In reining in the branches, the courts have been toughest on themselves, however. A long line of Supreme Court cases require that judges wait for cases to come to them. They can take cases only from plaintiffs who have a personal stake in the outcome; they cannot decide political questions; they cannot rule on an issue not squarely before them.
Because of these and other limitations, no case has made it far enough in federal court for a judge to rule on the merits of the basic constitutional questions at stake here. A pending case filed in July by the families of the three dead Americans does raise Fourth and Fifth Amendment challenges to the president’s killings of their relatives. We will see if the judge agrees to consider the constitutional questions or dismisses the case, citing limitations on his own power.
In another case, decided two weeks ago, a federal judge in Manhattan, Colleen McMahon, ruled, grudgingly, that the American Civil Liberties Union and two New York Times reporters could not get access, under the Freedom of Information Act, to classified legal memorandums that were relied on to justify the targeted killing program. In her opinion, she expressed serious reservations about the president’s interpretation of the constitutional questions. But the merits of the program were not before her, just access to the Justice Department memos, so her opinion was, in effect, nothing but an interesting read.
So at the moment, the legislature and the courts are flummoxed by, or don’t care about, how or whether to take on this aggressive program. But Mr. Obama, a former constitutional law professor, should know, of all people, what needs to be done. He was highly critical when Mr. Bush applied new constitutional theories to justify warrantless wiretapping and “enhanced interrogation.” In his 2008 campaign, Mr. Obama demanded transparency, and after taking office, he released legal memos that the Bush administration had kept secret. Once the self-serving constitutional analysis that the Bush team had used was revealed, legal scholars from across the spectrum studied and denounced it.
While Mr. Obama has criticized his predecessor, he has also worried about his successors. Last fall, when the election’s outcome was still in doubt, Mr. Obama talked about drone strikes in general and said Congress and the courts should in some manner “rein in” presidents by putting a “legal architecture in place.” His comments seemed to reflect concern that future presidents should perhaps not wield alone such awesome and unchecked power over life and death — of anyone, not just Americans. Oddly, under current law, Congress and the courts are involved when presidents eavesdrop on Americans, detain them or harshly interrogate them — but not when they kill them.
It is not just the most recent president, this one and the next whom we need to worry about when it comes to improper exercise of power. It is every president. Mr. Obama should declassify and release, to Congress, the press and the public, documents that set forth the detailed constitutional and statutory analysis he relies on for targeting and killing American citizens.
Perhaps Mr. Obama still believes that, in a democracy, the people have a right to know the legal theories upon which the president executes his great powers. Certainly, we can hope so. After all, his interpretation might be wrong.
JORDAN NEWS: Islamists, Pro-Reform Movements demonstrate in Amman, blasting elections
Protesters crowded at the Jabal Hussein vital intersection, Firas Circle, and extended towards Interior Ministry Circle.
The area was cleared of traffic since early Friday morning, in preparation for the demonstration that included a Friday prayer sermon delivered by Jordan Muslim Brotherhood comptroller Hammam Saeed.
The Public Security Department (PSD) has made a comprehensive plan to deal with the major demonstration planned to be staged by the Islamist and pro-reform movements in Amman on Friday, less than a week before the scheduled upcoming parliamentary elections.
PSD spokesperson Lt. Col. Mohammad Khatib said that security forces will take measures to facilitate traffic during the protest, scheduled to be held following Friday mid-day prayer at Firas Circle in Jabal Hussein, nearby the Interior Ministry Circle.
Police blocked all entrances into the vital intersection starting at 7 AM.
The Muslim Brotherhood and its political arm, the Islamic Action Front (IAF), in addition to various youth and popular pro-reform movements called for a major demonstration under the banner of "Popular Legitimacy" to call for tangible reform measures and combatting corruption, while holding steadfast to their decision to boycott the upcoming parliamentary elections, slated to be held on Wednesday, January 23, 2013.
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