
Continue reading NJ Transit Police Probe into ID of Mystery Woman Struck, Killed by Train in 2008
Continue reading NJ Transit Police Probe into ID of Mystery Woman Struck, Killed by Train in 2008
BY DAVID DAYEN
October 14, 2016
The most important revelation in the WikiLeaks dump of John Podesta’s emails has nothing to do with Hillary Clinton. The messages go all the way back to 2008, when Podesta served as co-chair of President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team. And a month before the election, the key staffing for that future administration was almost entirely in place, revealing that some of the most crucial decisions an administration can make occur well before a vote has been cast.
Michael Froman, who is now U.S. trade representative but at the time was an executive at Citigroup, wrote an email to Podesta on October 6, 2008, with the subject “Lists.” Froman used a Citigroup email address. He attached three documents: a list of women for top administration jobs, a list of non-white candidates, and a sample outline of 31 cabinet-level positions and who would fill them. “The lists will continue to grow,” Froman wrote to Podesta, “but these are the names to date that seem to be coming up as recommended by various sources for senior level jobs.”
The cabinet list ended up being almost entirely on the money. It correctly identified Eric Holder for the Justice Department, Janet Napolitano for Homeland Security, Robert Gates for Defense, Rahm Emanuel for chief of staff, Peter Orszag for the Office of Management and Budget, Arne Duncan for Education, Eric Shinseki for Veterans Affairs, Kathleen Sebelius for Health and Human Services, Melody Barnes for the Domestic Policy Council, and more. For the Treasury, three possibilities were on the list: Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and Timothy Geithner.
https://newrepublic.com/article/137798/important-wikileaks-revelation-isnt-hillary-clinton
By MIKE ALLEN
02/25/08 09:50 AM EST
Obama campaign manager David Plouffe accused the Clinton campaign Monday of “shameful offensive fear-mongering” by circulating a photo as an attempted smear.
Plouffe was reacting to a banner headline on the Drudge Report saying that aides to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) had e-mailed a photo calling attention to the African roots of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).
“The photo, taken in 2006, shows the Democrat front-runner dressed as a Somali Elder, during his visit to Wajir, a rural area in northeastern Kenya,” the Drudge Report said. The photo created huge buzz in political circles and immediately became known as “the ‘dressed’ photo,”
Read more: https://www.politico.com/story/2008/02/obama-slams-smear-photo-008667#ixzz4KYV6qlCk
by Tyler Durden
Jul 15, 2016 7:05 AM
The bizarre financial paradoxes unleashed by central planning continue.
While the S&P rises to new all time highs day after day, the IMF is about to downgrade global growth again, $13 trillion in global bonds trade with a negative yield, and the shape of the US yield curve is where it was the last time the US entered a recession. But what remains the most perplexing aspect of the unprecedented disconnect between market surreality and fundamentals, is the ongoing surge in corporate defaults, which is now on pace to surpass 2009, the worst year in history for corporate bankruptcies.
According to S&P, with half of 2016 in the history books, corporate bond defaults just hit the milestone “century” mark, or 100, last week, rising by 50% from the number of bankruptcies at this time last year and the highest level since the US emerged from recession in 2009. The number rose by four to 100 in the first full week of July, as defaults in the US oil and gas sector ratcheted higher, according to Diane Vazza of S&P Global Ratings, the FT reports.
As a result, the total amount of defaulted debt has risen to $154 billion.
But what is most troubling is that at the current run-rate, with half of 2016 still to come, the global debt default total is on pace to surpass 2009 for the all time corporate bankruptcy record.
by MATTHEW BOYLE AND ANDY BADOLATO26 Apr 20165,714
Election data compiled by Breitbart News on the Democratic Party’s primaries and caucuses in 2016 and 2008 show that turnout in is down significantly, nearly 20 percent, from the last contested election.
The data also show that the about 4.5 million fewer people have voted in the Democratic presidential contest this year versus 2008.
This year’s contest is a two-person race between Democratic Socialist
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT)
16%
of Vermont and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Clinton is also a former U.S. Senator from New York, a position she held after eight years as first lady.
Hillary Clinton also ran for president in 2008, which makes this data all the more interesting: It’s essentially a comparison up against her previous failed race, when she was the frontrunning Democratic presidential candidate until then Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois blew past her late in the game taking the lead before winning the nomination and then eventually the presidency.
Back in 2008, as Obama battled Clinton, a whopping 23,715,866 people voted in primaries and caucuses nationwide in the states that have already voted this cycle. Fast forward to the next time there’s a Democratic primary for president, this year (since Obama was the incumbent president seeking reelection the primaries in 2012 were largely perfunctory), and turnout has dropped off significantly. Just 19,155,825 people have voted thus far in primaries and caucuses this cycle, a decrease of 4,560,041 voters or 19.23 percent.
The steep drop off is so significant on the Democratic side that the vast majority of states saw drops in voter participation in Democratic primaries and caucuses. The following contests saw less voters participate on the Democratic side in the primaries and caucuses than 2008’s contests: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Utah, Wisconsin, Vermont, American Samoa, Hawaii, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Nevada, Washington state, and Wyoming.
Only a handful of states have seen increases in participation on the Democratic side, including Arizona, Michigan, Alaska, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas and Maine. With the exception of Arizona, Sanders won—and Clinton lost—each of those contests. That means the likely Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, has only increased Democratic primary votes in one of the states she won this cycle as compared with 2008’s primary turnout. Every other state she has won this year has seen less turnout from last go-around.
photo by Boyd Loving
Stephen Moore / @StephenMoore / October 16, 2015
My 13-year-old son told me at the dinner table the other day that Franklin Roosevelt was one of America’s “greatest presidents” because “he ended the Great Depression.” He’s usually a good student, so I checked where he got this tripe, and sure enough, the fairy tale was right there in his American history book.
The textbook tells kids that the New Deal ended the Great Depression and even saved capitalism. Of course, the New Deal exacerbated the pain and financial devastation of a stock market crash, and unemployment lingered in double digits for a decade after Roosevelt was elected until the start of World War II.
We get this kind of rampant revisionism because the left writes the history books—which they are doing right now.
Here’s the latest story line: bailouts, trillions of dollars of government spending and debt, easy money, and re-regulation of Wall Street ended the 2008 Great Recession. The myth took on new life last week when Ben Bernanke took a bow in the Wall Street Journal for, in his mind, saving the economy with his $3 trillion of quantitative easing and zero interest rate policy. No, actually, this is what created the crisis. Don’t be surprised if Bernanke receives a Nobel Peace Prize.
The Daily Signal is the multimedia news organization of The Heritage Foundation. We’ll respect your inbox and keep you informed.
Sign Up
As my fellow Heritage colleague Norbert Michel and other scholars have thoroughly documented, the crash of 2008 was caused by government policies and regulatory failure, including easy money policies that flooded the markets with debt. Within a decade, these policies led to preposterous mortgage loans being issued, and massive over-leverage of government, companies, and households.
Now the Fed, the White House, and Congress are recreating the very same conditions for another financial bubble. If it pops, we could replay the same devastating effects as occurred during the first bubble in 1999 and 2000. It is doing so in four ways:
First, the Dodd-Frank regulations are exacerbating one of the greatest consolidations of the banking industry since the Great Depression. Those indispensable small banks, like the one Jimmy Stewart operated in the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life,” are disappearing from the American landscape.
This is largely because big government policies are slanting the system in favor of big banks. Because of this, we have created a competitive advantage that allows the sharks to swallow the minnows. Meanwhile, the “too big to fail” safety net to Bank of America, Citi, and other titans exacerbates this cost advantage of big banks and thus makes bailouts even more likely in the future.
Second, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are engaged in the same low down payment lending mania of 2004-07, and the Obama administration is on a Bush-like homeownership push. Fannie and Freddie are again guaranteeing mortgages with as little as 3 percent down payment. Have we learned nothing at all?
Fannie and Freddie are again guaranteeing mortgages with as little as 3 percent down payment. Have we learned nothing at all?
Third, the Fed refused to tighten its stance in September, and, hello, that easy money policy is how we got into the mess in 2000 and then in 2008. Wall Street cheered Janet Yellen’s decision to keep the cheap dollars flowing.
Finally, there is the saturation of debt. When the crisis hit in 2008, the national debt stood at a little under $10 trillion. Now we are over $18 trillion. Government is hopelessly over-leveraged, and the interest rate exposure is enormous. With each one-percentage-point rise in long-term rates, the servicing costs of the debt rises by about $1.8 trillion over ten years.
The point is that government and politicians have no learning curve. All of the conditions of financial wreckage are reappearing. The presidential candidates should start warning voters that Washington is rebuilding another financial house of cards.
If they don’t, when the financial crash comes and Americans see their life savings disappear, the media and the history books will again blame conservatives for the destruction from the rampant financial negligence of government.
https://dailysignal.com/2015/10/16/washingtons-set-the-stage-for-another-financial-crisis/