Ridgewood NJ, James P Lavin, age 83, of Ridgewood, NJ passed away peacefully on March 2, 2023. Surviving him are his daughter Jean (Ian Morgan), sons James and Thomas (Amanda). Proud grandfather of Liam and Henry. His sister Barbara Tomany survives him, as do nieces Karen and Jennifer, nephews Tommy, Marty, Matthew and Patrick. He is predeceased by his wife Bridget Lavin, sister Priscilla Heatherton, brother Tom Lavin, nephew Robert Heatherton and sister and brothers in laws Katherine Lavin, James Tomany and George Heatherton.
Washington DC, President Biden celebrated Thanksgiving with his family in Nantucket , but if polls of his job performance and handling of issues like the economy and foreign policy are any guide, he didn’t have much to be grateful for.
Ridgewood NJ, the whispers from the White House and the Federal Reserve Board that inflation is “transitory” have become less and less persuasive with each passing day. The new CPI numbers show 5.4% year over year inflation and the September number on an annualized basis is above 6%. Recall from last week that the commodities index is at a five year high and is up than 50% over a year ago. Here are three additional charts from our friend and financial wizard Scott Grannis that we thought were eye-popping. You can make up your own mind if you think inflation is a problem.
Ridgewood NJ, the economic whizz kids at the White House and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell keep saying inflation is “transitory.” But Friday morning’s Producer Price Index report show an 8.3% rise for the 12 months. DOL Says that’s “the largest annual increase since the US Department of Labor started measuring this price indicator in 2011.”
Washington DC, the Bureau of Labor Statistics posted a CPI number of 5% over the last 12-months, the highest rate since 2008. Gas prices rose 56.2% in 12 months, the highest since Jimmy Carter’s last year in office.
Ridgewood NJ, according to AAA the average price for gasoline in New Jersey is only 11 cents away from being $3 per gallon. The average price for gas as of Monday was at $2.89 per gallon – up 5 cents from last week. Gas prices have risen 29 cents in the last month. The price of gas one year ago was $2.45 – an increase of 44 cents. The average price of gas in New Jersey is up 12 cents from the national average, which currently stands at $2.77 per gallon.
Ridgewood NJ, since the November election the CRB commodities index has been surging. This index of nearly 20 major commodities – from silver, to copper, to corn, to coal – hit it’s three-year high on Monday at 205. That’s a 35% commodity price spike from election day when it stood at 154. Energy prices have led the ascent. The index had been rising throughout 2020 from its collapse in March and April when the virus hit.
For centuries on end this was how the Muslim world and the West interacted. Literally, this was more or less the only mode of interaction. Muslim raiders descended upon a littoral Mediterranean town or village on the mainland of Europe or in England or Ireland and dragged their hostages to one or another Muslim city in North Africa.
Later, we would diligently pay the muslim captors to get as many of our people back as we could afford. For hundreds of years thus was business as usual. Western populations were weak and vulnerable to the depredations of a barbaric culture that was stuck in the 7th cenury, and there was no option but to endure the raids and pay the ransom demanded. If any hostage renounced the Christian faith to avoid the cruel treatment given to kaffirs or infidels, the Catholic Church, having limited funds for this purpose, would generally not pay for that person’s release, favoring instead those who had kept the faith. That was the price for apostasy at the time. There still exists some kind of Holy See office, largely dormant now, that conducted this hostage ransoming work. Those who were engaged in it were seen as doing the Lord’s work in saving souls from the grip of Satan. And that’s exactly what they were doing.
Now, the Obama administration didn’t pay 400 million in ransom for this laudable reason. No, it was vulnerable to heavy criticism from the likes of Donald Trump for abandoning the American hostages during the so-called nuclear negotiations and needed to save Hillary’s electoral bacon by eliminating the Iranian hostage situation as an issue during the presidential race. Humanitarian motivations played no part in the calculus.
DECEMBER 24, 2015, 10:16 PM LAST UPDATED: THURSDAY, DECEMBER 24, 2015, 10:22 PM
BY CAROL MORELLO AND FRANCES STEAD SELLERS
THE WASHINGTON POST |
WIRE SERVICE
Compensation for American Embassy personnel held hostage for 444 days in Iran more than three decades ago was hailed on Thursday by the former captives and the lawyers who for years fought Tehran and Washington to get a measure of vindication.
A provision buried in a spending bill signed by President Obama last week will give up to $4.4 million to each of the 37 surviving hostages or the estates of 16 others who died in the years since their release. The sum works out to $10,000 for each day of their captivity and will come, in part, from a $9 billion penalty paid by the French bank BNP Paribas for violating sanctions against Iran, Cuba and Sudan.
“Iran is not paying the money, but it’s as close as you can get,” said Thomas Lankford, an attorney who represented the former hostages and their families in a lengthy battle that continued even after the courts and the U.S. government repeatedly denied their requests for restitution. Lankford called the restitution “gratifying after a long, long time.”
The financial settlement also provides potential benefits for victims of other terrorist attacks, including the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in East Africa and for first responders to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Jimmy Carter’s disastrous DREAM ACT: the Mariel boat lift
Gil Guignat
Phoenix Conservative Examiner
There are some 500,000 illegal immigrants plowing through Arizona every year. The damage to the environment is staggering. The crime from the drug trade is appalling. President Obama in his infinite wisdom now has enacted a policy to let anyone who can drive, walk or fly into the United States stay indefinitely and apply for a work permit and welfare benefits.
It is amazing that President Obama is competing with PresidentJimmy Carter for who has the most stupid and disastrous DREAM ACT and who will have had the most destructive administration to the country’s wellbeing in the history of the United States.
The year was 1980 and the economy in Cuba was in shambleswhere the Cuban GDP shrank by 35%. Our genius president at the time was Jimmy Carter. He agreed along with Cuban dictator Fidel Castro to allow whoever wanted to leave Cuba to come and immigrate to the United States with no pre-conditions. The departure of these Cuban immigrants occurred from the Mariel Harbor in Cuba between April 15 and October 31 1980.
Not surprisingly, Obama’s DREAM ACT policies now allow anyone on the planet to walk, drive or fly to the United States with no pre-conditions. The new arrivals will also be allowed to apply for work permits and all welfare benefits.
Over 125,000 Cuban immigrants came into Florida and unemployment went up a whopping 50%. What do you think will happen to unemployment now that President Obama has announced to the whole planet that anyone can come and stay in the United States?
Criminals and the mentally ill
The Mariel boatlift started going badly when it was discovered that Castro emptied his prisons and asylums. He put the inmates on boats and sent them to Florida. Basically, President Carter created the necessary conditions so that the United States would be viewed as a dumping ground for the worst of the worst in society.
“Fidel Castro declared that those who were leaving the country were Lumpens (or undesirables) and the escoria (or scum) of Cuban society. America had been tricked into receiving Cuba’s undesirables among the refugees. Base-level cells of the Cuban Communist Party staged meetings at the homes of those known to be leaving the country. People were intimidated by these “repudiation meetings” (mitines de repudio) where the participants screamed obscenities and defiled the facades of the homes, throwing eggs and garbage, for hours. Those who opposed the intimidation became victims of the attacks themselves and lost their jobs or their seats at the college or university that they had been attending.Towards the end of the crisis, the repudiation meetings were forbidden, but the damage had already been done.
With no diplomatic ties or methods to distinguish refugee from inmate, many released inmates were eventually jailed in Florida for crimes they committed after their arrival.” More
Notice the last two lines of the above quote. The criminals that came from Castro’s emptied jails ended up in American jails.Homeland Security SecretaryJanet Napolitano recently said that granting work permits and essentially permanent status to illegal aliens would allow DHS to focus on the criminal elements. How exactly are they going to know what is criminal and what is not as millions of immigrants start flooding the borders? How exactly are they going to know which ones have criminal records in their respective countries and which ones do not? The answer is that they simply do not know. Arizona alone gets 500,000 illegal immigrants per year passing through the state.
Obama’s ‘Minimal’ World Leadership Brings Jimmy Carter, Chris Christie Together
Ken McIntyre / @KenMac55 / July 01, 2015 /
In a rare alignment of two very different politicians, Jimmy Carter and Chris Christie agree in their belief that America is less respected in the world than it was when President Obama took office in 2009.
“I can’t think of many nations where we have a better relationship than when we did when [Obama] took over,” Jimmy Carter says.
Christie, the two-term New Jersey governor, zinged Obama on foreign policy in some of the most well-received lines of his announcement Tuesday morning that he will seek the Republican nomination for president.
“After seven years I heard the president of the United States say the other day that the world respects America more because of his leadership,” Christie said. “This convinces me it is the final confirmation that President Obama lives in his own world, not in our world.”
It was a big applause line.
Not so much when Carter, the Democrat who served one term as the 39th president, said something similar last week in a public event—video of which began to surface late Tuesday.
America’s “influence and prestige and respect in the world is probably lower” than seven years ago, he said.
“The United States’ influence and prestige and respect in the world is probably lower now,” Jimmy Carter says.
Carter, 90, seemed to stun into silence a standing-room-only crowd at an Aspen Institute gathering in Aspen, Colo., when he said he “can’t think of many nations in the world where we have a better relationship now than when we did when [Obama] took over.”
When Aspen Institute CEO Walter Isaacson asked Carter to assess Obama’s “success or failures on the world stage,” Carter replied:
On the world stage, I think they’ve been minimal. I think he’s done some good things domestically, like the health program and so forth. But on the world stage, just to be as objective about it as I can, I can’t think of many nations in the world where we have a better relationship now than when we did when he took over.
You know, if you look at Russia, if you look at England, if you look at China, if you look at Egypt, and so forth—I’m not saying it’s his fault, but we have not improved our relationship with individual countries. And I would say that the United States’ influence and prestige and respect in the world is probably lower now than it was six or seven years ago.
During his off-the-cuff announcement remarks, Christie also criticized Obama for “weak and feckless foreign policy” and warned his audience not to “turn it over to his second mate, Hillary Clinton.”
Carter reiterated that he doesn’t “blame” Obama because “it’s been circumstances that have evolved.”
The former president and Georgia governor repeated praise for John Kerry, whom Obama chose to succeed Clinton as secretary of state.
To applause, Carter called Kerry “outstanding” and “one of the best secretaries of state we’ve ever had.” He later said Kerry is “very courageous and innovative and dynamic.”
The Washington-based Aspen Institute is an educational and policy studies organization with a mission “to foster leadership based on enduring values and to provide a nonpartisan venue for dealing with critical issues.”
Isaacson’s hour-long conversation with Carter and his wife, former first lady Rosalynn Carter, took place June 23. In this video from C-SPAN, Carter’s remarks on Obama and the world stage begin at the 19-minute mark.
Americans Not In The Labor Force Rise To Record 93,194,000
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 05/08/2015 08:57 -0400
In what was an “unambiguously” unpleasant April jobs payrolls report, with a March revision dragging that month’s job gain to the lowest level since June of 2012, the fact that the number of Americans not in the labor force rose once again, this time to 93,194K from 93,175K, with the result being a participation rate of 69.45 or just above the lowest percentage since 1977, will merely catalyze even more upside to the so called “market” which continues to reflect nothing but central bank liquidity, and thus – the accelerating deterioration of the broader economy.
Jimmy Carter has had a long-standing reputation as authoring the most ineffective foreign policy of any modern presidency.
To be honest, Carter deserves better.
When the man from Plains, Ga., moved to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, he came wearing the anti-establishment headdress. In particular, when it came to foreign and defense policy, Carter promised that his policies would be anything but business as usual.
America, Carter claimed, could do less in the world. So he planned to pull U.S. troops out of Korea. His foreign policy would be based on fostering “human rights” and talking peace instead of war.
From the beginning, however, almost no foreign policy initiative went right. While the Camp David accords eventually led to the 1979Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, they did not yield a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, because the Palestinians rejected them from the start. As war rages between Israel and Hamas today, the accords never delivered on the promise of delivering a road map to long-term peace.
Where Carter struggled most, however, was over relations with the Soviet Union. Moscow saw Washington’s post-Vietnam malaise as a clear sign that the American century had ended early. The Soviets went on the offensive in almost every corner of the globe.
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan galvanized Carter in a manner that has been mostly forgotten. Most Americans recall Carter’s feckless decision to pull the U.S. team out of the upcoming Olympics in Moscow, a self-defeating gesture that accomplished little. But as his presidential term neared its end, Carter apparently decided he was tired of being a foreign-policy doormat for Moscow.
He declared the “Carter Doctrine,” warning the Soviets that he would protect U.S. interests in the Middle East “by force if necessary.” And he ordered the establishment of a rapid deployment force, which would be capable of delivering a massive U.S. military capability into the Persian Gulf.
Further, Carter ordered the development of new generations of military capability and even proposed increasing defense spending, which had been in free-fall since the end of the Vietnam War.
This burst of seriousness didn’t save his presidency. The poor state of the U.S. economy, coupled with the embarrassment of the hostage situation at the U.S. embassy in Tehran, crippled his re-election efforts. Still, Carter left office amid signs that he had learned from his mistakes.
A common joke among conservatives during the 2012 campaign was that if Obama got re-elected, Americans would see what Carter’s second term would have looked like. But Carter might have been a bolder president in his second term. Obama, on the other hand, clearly has not. His second-term agenda has lurched from embarrassment to failure and back again.
Further, Obama has shown no signs of acknowledging that his own policies have contributed much to the reversals he has suffered on virtually every front, from managing Moscow to the mushrooming threat of transnational terrorism.
In no corner of the world had Obama seen more setbacks than in the Middle East. And he is running out of time to clean up his mess before leaving office.
Most of what Obama has broken can’t be fixed. But he could give the next U.S. president a fighting chance by following Carter’s example and doing something.
Reversing the atrophy of American military capabilities would be a start. He could also work to build solid relations with the countries the U.S. will need to build a solid foundation for a Middle East policy. The U.S. needs a string of strong bilateral alliances from Turkey to Jordan, Israel, Egypt, Morocco, Niger, Tunisia, and Algeria to help restore stability to the Middle East and North Africa.
For now, however, comparing Obama to Carter is an insult to Carter.
“Here I come to save the day!” Jimmy Carter offers to visit Venezuela
Didn’t this Idiot do enough Damage Already ?
Humberto Fontova | Mar 01, 2014
Last week Jimmy Carter fired off letters to Venezuela’s fraudulent President Nicolas Maduro and to Venezuela’s defrauded Presidential candidate Enrique Capriles expressing “grave concern” regarding the political turmoil and bloodshed convulsing their nation. From his pulpit at Emory University’s Carter Center, the former U.S. president calls for “dialogue” among the embattled Venezuelan parties and offers to visit the troubled nation–but not as a formal “mediator.”
The news of Carter’s proposed Venezuela visit was only hours old when alarmed Venezuelan anti-socialists sent out an SOS: “Please, desist from your trip,” reads an open letter from Venezuelan blogger/journalist Daniel Duquenal. “You have absolutely no credibility in Venezuela…You have cursed us enough as it is. I can assure you that half of the country has no respect nor credibility for you and the other half (the Castroites) thinks you are a mere fool that they can use and discard as needed.”
