ANTIQUES ROADSHOW
AMERICA'S NEXT TOP MODEL
CARTOON NETWORK
ANIMAL PLANET
JUDGE JUDY
BARACK AND KATE PLUS EIGHTAccording to White House insiders, multiple appearances on these channels should greatly increase the president's popularity numbers.
ANTIQUES ROADSHOW
AMERICA'S NEXT TOP MODEL
CARTOON NETWORK
ANIMAL PLANET
JUDGE JUDY
BARACK AND KATE PLUS EIGHT
20. @iowahawkblog:Breitbart News reports on a promotional booklet produced in 1991 by Barack Obama's then-literary agency which describes the author as "born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii."
Miriam Goderich issued the following statement to Political Wire:
"You're undoubtedly aware of the brouhaha stirred up by Breitbart about the erroneous statement in a client list Acton & Dystel published in 1991 (for circulation within the publishing industry only) that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. This was nothing more than a fact checking error by me -- an agency assistant at the time. There was never any information given to us by Obama in any of his correspondence or other communications suggesting in any way that he was born in Kenya and not Hawaii. I hope you can communicate to your readers that this was a simple mistake and nothing more."
Full disclosure: I am a client of the same literary agency.
A Michigan teen made a gristly [sic] discovery after biting into an Arby's junior roast beef sandwich.
Ryan Hart said he had nearly polished off his sandwich last Friday when he bit into something tough to chew that tasted like rubber, so he spit it out.
Turns out it tasted like finger. The fleshy pad of an unfortunate employee's finger, apparently.
"I was like, `That (has) to be a finger,"' Hart, 14, told the Jackson Citizen Patriot on Wednesday. "I was about to puke. ... It was just nasty."
The employee apparently cut her finger on a meat slicer and left her station without immediately telling anyone, said Steve Hall, the environmental health director for the Jackson County health department. Her co-workers continued filling orders before they became aware of what happened, he said.
John Gray, a spokesman for Atlanta-based Arby's, released a statement Wednesday apologizing for what he described as an isolated and "unfortunate incident." He said Arby's is still investigating, but has determined that the Jackson workers shut down food production as soon as they found out what happened and thoroughly cleaned and sanitized the restaurant.
...Ryan's mother, Jamie Vail, was incredulous. She and her friend, Joe Wheaton, had taken Ryan and his 11-year-old brother to the Arby's drive-through, and she said she thought her son was joking when he exclaimed he had found a piece of a finger in his sandwich... "Somebody loses a finger, and you keep sending food out the window? I can't believe that," said Vail. She and Wheaton said the severed section was about an eighth to a quarter-inch thick and at least one inch long.
Breitbart News has obtained a promotional booklet produced in 1991 by Barack Obama's then-literary agency, Acton & Dystel, which touts Obama as "born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii."
The booklet, which was distributed to "business colleagues" in the publishing industry, includes a brief biography of Obama among the biographies of eighty-nine other authors represented by Acton & Dystel...
Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii. The son of an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister, he attended Columbia University and worked as a financial journalist and editor for Business International Corporation. He served as project coordinator in Harlem for the New York Public Interest Research Group, and was Executive Director of the Developing Communities Project in Chicago’s South Side. His commitment to social and racial issues will be evident in his first book, Journeys in Black and White.
...The errant Obama biography in the Acton & Dystel booklet does not contradict the authenticity of Obama's birth certificate. Moreover, several contemporaneous accounts of Obama’s background describe Obama as having been born in Hawaii.
The biography does, however, fit a pattern in which Obama--or the people representing and supporting him--manipulate his public persona.
David Maraniss's forthcoming biography of Obama has reportedly confirmed, for example, that a girlfriend Obama described in Dreams from My Father was, in fact, an amalgam of several separate individuals.
QOTD: "Israel would ... be taking a very great gamble to think that the United States will save it from Iran’s nukes." --Elliot Abrams
Vice President Joe Biden is telling Ohio voters today that “things really are starting to come back.”
Is one of those “things” the U.S. economy? Because as the following three charts show, the U.S. economy is struggling through an abysmal recovery not really worth the name:
1. Sickly Economic Growth
2. Falling Real Wages
3. A Shrunken Labor Force
[...But] perhaps President Obama can somehow argue things are going about as well as can be expected after a financial crisis. Then again, a recent CBS-New York Times poll found that 67% of Americans think the economy is “bad” and gave Mitt Romney a 46-43 lead over the president.
So far voters don’t seem to be really buying Biden’s — or Obama’s — comeback story. They may not have seen these three charts, but they sure are feeling them, unfortunately, in their everyday lives. From Gallup:<
May 15, 2012
Steve,
The warning shots have begun. I will tell you that this week has been heavy in the financial world, as I predicted that it would be from my last update... The reverberations of the JP Morgan $2 Billion dollar derivative trade loss is playing out and the fissures have finally began to manifest on the foundations of the world market. What you will see in the next few weeks is continued talks and hearings about financial regulations and other such stall tactics. This is all a cover and a ruse. The $2 billion dollar loss is just a smoke screen to further hide the truth of the $2 billion loss from MF Global. Which I will tell you from my sources [is that] Jamie Dimon and JP Morgan Chase were the sole beneficiaries of that "loss" . In truth, JP Morgan has taken delivery and full liquidation of MF Global assets, thus the $2 billion derivative loss is no big deal for the following reasons:
1. Americans and most MSM talking heads do not understand derivatives, thus it is easy to throw out cliches, axioms and jargon with cries for more regulations. Thus Dimon and his cronies at JPM know that they will skate free from all litigation. After all, he was once again voted in as CEO by the JPM board. Why? Because he covered the loss of JPM trades with MF Global's "missing" $2 billion. JPM knew about the derivative loss for months.
2. The $2 billion loss will cause the needed outcry from America's Banker (Dimon) to call for more power that will favor the Too Big To Fails (TBTF) Banks. This will allow them to further prop up the crumbling economy just long enough that it will allow them to further liquidate and conglomerate America's wealth into fewer and fewer hands. All this before the coming Euro collapse which will occur this winter. This $2 billion JPM trade loss is the perfect catalyst needed by the MSM to keep the ruse and distraction going.
Greece has gone past the point of no return and RBS, UBS, Satander and SG are all implementing the final contingency plans for a Euro withdrawal and Drachma resurgence. This will occur very quickly creating hyper-velocity and massive Euro bond dumps the likes of which we have never seen. The actions of Greece will inspire austerity-strapped Italy, Spain and Portugal to do the same. France will tailspin as the French have the greatest exposure to this coming crisis[, more] than any other nation in the Eurozone. Look for Hollande to move for a Euro exit as well due to overwhelming pressure from his far left socialist party. Hollande has to comply, [and] if he does not it would be political suicide.
Same goes for Germany, Merkel's party lost BIG in Germany's largest state North Rhine Westphalia (NRW), which way NRW goes, so goes the rest of Germany. Anti-Euro sentiment is strong and it can not be stopped no matter what the bankers are doing.
The Euro is on it's last legs [and] I do not see this currency continuing past 2013. There will be a quick dash to the dollar as a security blanket but that too will fail once the American derivative exposure can no longer be hidden. The final straw that will bring down this house of cards will be the $200-$300 trillion of American derivative exposure. The derivative bubble will pop.
What Dimon and JPM has signaled to the world elites and bankers in code is simply this... "It's time to get out of Dodge."
Best Regards,
V.

QOTD: "The U.S. had prepared an air strike to support the Kurds and repel Saddam’s Republican Guard forces in northern Iraq. At this day, at the golf tournament, I started receiving phone calls from Sandy Berger—who was, at the time, the National Security Council Advisor—asking for President Clinton to go ahead and authorize this attack to repel Saddam’s forces, as they were really massacring thousands and thousands of Kurds in the northern part of Iraq. I approached President Clinton on three occasions at this golf tournament to ask him for the go-ahead to launch this attack. We had Air Force fighters in the air, ready to drop bombs and to repel Saddam’s forces, and on three occasions, President Clinton could not be bothered to take the phone call from Sandy Berger. So, on three occasions I approached the President, he brushed me off—he wanted to watch the golf tournament. So I saw, really, for the first time, the dereliction of duty, as it were, by President Clinton not being able—not being willing to take the phone call while thousands and thousands of Kurds were being slaughtered by Saddam Hussein. That was really my first insight.
…we had at least eight times, up to ten times that I recall, that we had a chance to either capture or kill Osama bin Laden. And on every single occasion, President Clinton chose to pass. I believe, quite frankly and honestly, that 9/11 was the responsibility—I put the blame for 9/11 at the feet of President Bill Clinton. I think he had many opportunities to take out bin Laden, to either capture him or kill him, and chose, every single time, not to pull the trigger. The movie—the series—The Path to 9/11 very accurately shows that the phone calls went all the way up to President Clinton, from Sandy Berger, and Clinton chose not to pull the trigger. Again, I think that’s a very accurate representation of what happened, and I think President Bill Clinton was responsible for 9/11." --Lt. Col. Buzz Patterson, Senior Military Aide to President Bill Clinton
A new poll of Arkansas Democrats shows Barack Obama receiving support from only 45 percent of Democratic primary voters in Arkansas’s Fourth Congressional District, while 38 percent support his underfunded and relatively unknown primary challenger, Tennessee lawyer John Wolfe, Jr. Seventeen percent are undecided in the district poll.
...Wolfe predicted that the voters would move his way in the final days before the May 22 primary, despite his shoestring campaign budget. “There’s not been a single TV ad. There’s not been a single radio ad,” he said.
...Wolfe has criticized Obama for being too close to Wall Street and its interests (for example, Obama’s latest fundraiser with private equity lenders last night in New York City) and seeks to be a more principled Democrat than the 44th president.
Wolfe also said he supports repealing the president's signature legislation, Obamacare, which he says doesn’t lower health care costs even if the White House claims otherwise.
We've been treated to a mythical GOP "war on women", a "debate" on birth control, a "road to Damascus" moment on gay marriage, an "expose" of Romney "bullying" in high school, and the burning question of who is a better pet owner. Unfortunately for Obama and his allies in the media, none of it is working...
...All that said, it's what the Obama campaign tried to do proactively yesterday that convinces me they are in full panic... Yesterday, the Obama campaign tried to attack Romney's business experience with an ad focusing on steelworkers who lost their job when their company, GST Steel, went bankrupt. GST Steel was controlled by Romney's former firm, Bain Capital. The story of GST Steel has already been told at least twice; by Ted Kennedy in 1994 and Newt Gingrich in this year's primary. Every time, it has been pointed out that the bankruptcy occurred two years after Romney left Bain Capital. So, as hits go, its pretty weak stuff.
It was the opening salvo in what is expected to be a sustained attack on Romney's experience in private equity. So, what did Obama do after he launched this attack on private equity? He, of course, jetted to New York for a fundraiser with private equity traders... Even the palace guards at Business Insider noticed the bad optics
...Remember that at the end of last week, when the news was supposed to be about gay marriage and Romney "bullying" a possibly gay student in high school, Rasmussen showed Romney handily beating Obama in a general election match-up. Romney had not only withstood the full barrage of the Democrat-Media complex, he improved his standing with likely voters. That's when the panic set in.
...Yesterday's Bain hit was a rushed retread of an already discredited attack. The Obama campaign tried to push it with a hastily arranged media conference call scheduled for 10:45 am EDT, late into the news cycle. If this were a well-planned hit, the call would have been much earlier or one or two media outlets would have been fed information for corroborating stories... Yes, it is only May and polls are just polls. It will be a long campaign through the Fall, with many twist and turns. But, the events of the past 24 hours suggest that Obama is already losing control of the campaign narrative.
The ZTE Score M is an Android 2.3.4 (Gingerbread) phone available in the United States on MetroPCS, made by Chinese telecom ZTE Corporation.
There is a setuid-root application at /system/bin/sync_agent that serves no function besides providing a root shell backdoor on the device. Just give the magic, hard-coded password to get a root shell:
$ sync_agent ztex1609523
# id
uid=0(root) gid=0(root)
Nice backdoor, ZTE.
darn, geek.com says it is real.....
If anyone reading this owns a ZTE Score M Android smartphone, your device has been found to include a backdoor allowing root access without user authentication.
The discovery of the backdoor comes via a post on the text storage website Pastebin. It has since been confirmed via Reddit by Justin Case of Cunning Logic and TeamAndIRC. He has confirmed with someone at ZTE that the backdoor does indeed exist and that a fix is in the works.
Oh look, we'll just make a master key! You locked that door? :-)
Nice guys, nice.... oh and ZTE makes more than phones -- they're the 5th largest telecommunications manufacturer in the world.
Lara Logan, CBS: That mission actually began five years before 9/11. That's when the CIA set up what became Hank Crumpton's special unit tasked with finding Osama bin Laden.
Hank Crumpton, Former Deputy Director of the CIA'S Counter-Terrorism Center: From '98, '99 all the way up to 2001, the warnings were there ... We had extensive human networks in Afghanistan, Afghan sources that had been reporting on al Qaeda, on the presence of bin Laden.
But Crumpton says the Clinton White House didn't trust the CIA's Afghan sources alone and they wanted U.S. eyes on the target.
Hank Crumpton: So we were driven to look at various technical options. And we looked at a range of things. Long-range optics, they were too heavy, too cumbersome to get over the mountains. We looked at balloons. The prevailing winds would take those balloons to China. That would be a bad thing. We scrapped that. And then we stumbled across the UAVs, particularly the Predator. And sure enough, wasn't long before we had the Predator in theater over Afghanistan, the Predator unarmed at the time. And our human sources took us to a village-- far-- not far from Kandahar.
Lara Logan: And what did you see there?
Hank Crumpton: We saw a security detail, a convoy and we saw bin Laden exit the vehicle.
Lara Logan: Clearly?
Hank Crumpton: Clearly. And we had-- the optics were spot on. It was beaming back to us, CIA headquarters. We immediately alerted the White House. And the Clinton administration's response was, "Well, it will take several hours for the TLAMs, the cruise missiles launched from submarines, to reach that objective. So you need to tell us where bin Laden will be five or six hours from now." The frustration was enormous.
Lara Logan: So at that moment you wanted to kill him?
Hank Crumpton: Yes.
Lara Logan: But you couldn't get permission?
Hank Crumpton: Correct.
He couldn't get permission to do anything, including allowing the CIA's Afghan agents on the ground to attack bin Laden's compound. That missed opportunity in the late summer of 1999, led Crumpton and his CIA team to figure out how to arm the Predator drone with hellfire missiles.
Lara Logan: So the Predator drone strikes that take place in the tribal areas of Pakistan today are a direct result of what happened when you had Osama bin Laden in your sights in Afghanistan and no way to kill him yourselves?
Hank Crumpton: It was a response to the lack of response on the part of the administration or DOD. So the handful of CIA officers that we had, in great frustration, we began the discussion of, "Okay. We find him again we will have to engage ourselves. And we'll have to do it right then, right there."
My informed sources suggest that what Berger destroyed were copies of the Millennium After-Action Review, a binder-sized report prepared by Richard Clarke in 2000—a year and half before the 9-11 attacks. The review made a series of recommendations for a tougher stance against bin Laden and terrorism. There are 13 or more copies of this report. But only one contains hand-written notes by President Bill Clinton. Apparently, in the margin beside the recommendations, Bill Clinton wrote NO, NO, NO next to many of the tougher policy proposals.
You can see why Clinton might be happy to see these records vanish down the memory hole... So Berger was stuffing in pants and socks and later shredding the evidence that President Clinton did not want to take a tougher line on bin Laden, following the 1998 attack on two U.S. embassies that killed 224 people (including 12 American diplomats).
Google is evidently taking its campaign to make its driverless cars legal on U.S. roads from state capitals to the nation’s capital. A Google robo-Prius was spotted last Tuesday roaming the streets of Washington, D.C., only a day after Nevada became the first state to legalize autonomous vehicles on the Silver State’s roads.
U.S. News & World Report speculated that Google was in town to appeal to federal policymakers, and possibly take them for joyrides in one of the company’s self-driving Prius hybrids. The outlet also noted that Google has racked up a reported $5 million legislative lobbying tab in the first quarter of 2012 alone – more contributed to candidates’ coffers in the same time period than Apple, Facebook and Microsoft combined.
QOTD: "...an analysis by Joseph Vranich, who studies migration of businesses from one state to another, finds that since 2009 the flight of businesses out of California "has increased fivefold due to high taxes and regulatory costs."
This month Chief Executive magazine reports that its annual survey of CEOs ranked California dead last among the 50 states in business climate. Texas was number one. The silver lining for Jerry Brown, if not for the California fisc, is that if you're already ranked 50th you can't get any lower—though he seems willing to try." --The Wall Street Journal
Tax-hike austerity failing in California, just like Europe
I am having problems comprehending this Bloomberg headline: “Brown Tax Increase Gains Urgency as Deficit Rises to $16 Billion.” The story is even more puzzling:
California Governor Jerry Brown bet that a nascent financial recovery would lift the world’s ninth-largest economy enough to whittle down a $9.2 billion deficit. Instead, the gap has widened to $16 billion.
Today the 74-year-old Democrat will unveil his revised budget and explain what additional spending must be cut. Tax collections have run $3.5 billion below what he calculated four months ago. Spending has grown $2 billion above projections... The new deficit estimate increases the urgency of the governor’s plans to increase income taxes on some earners to the highest in the nation, and boost sales levies that are now more than any other state.
The plan would temporarily raise the statewide sales tax, already the highest in the U.S., to 7.5 percent from 7.25 percent. It would also boost rates on income starting at $250,000. Those making $1 million or more, now taxed at 10.3 percent, would pay 13.3 percent, the most of any state.
Wait, taxes are rising and revenues are falling. So obviously the solution is even more taxes? Who’s running the show over there, the IMF? So the state with highest sales tax in America would also have the highest income tax in America?
As it is, California ranks 48th in the Tax Foundation’s State Business Tax Climate Index. The California Dream has become the Golden State Nightmare.