“James Clapper from the National Security Agency (NSA) lied to Congress and the American people when he testified before Congress that the NSA doesn’t spy on millions of American citizens. As a result of the actions of whistleblower Ed Snowden, we know now that the NSA does indeed illegally and unconstitutionally spy on millions of American citizens.”
“Isn’t it shocking that Obama has threatened to change American policy just because Karzai is being difficult? Should a policy that allegedly has fulfilled US vital security interests be drastically altered because of mere personal animosity? Yet we have been down this erratic policy road before. The Obama administration argued that keeping a residual postwar US military force in Iraq was vitally necessary, only to nix a settlement when the Iraqi government refused to exempt US soldiers from Iraqi law in the event they committed crimes—a rather imperial request to say the least. We can thus surmise that perhaps such residual occupation forces were never very vital to US security.”
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=4664
“Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Wednesday that the Fed’s easy-money policy is still necessary, throwing cold water on fresh market expectations that the Fed’s stimulus would soon be ended. Bernanke told an audience of economists in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that the jobs market remains too weak and inflation remains too low for comfort. He also warned that the full impact of steep government spending cuts initiated in March was yet to be seen. Together, the evidence underscored the need for the Fed to keep in place its highly accommodative monetary policy, he said.”
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/07/10/ben-bernanke-says-federal-reserve-stimulus-still-needed/
“The DOE requested about $537 million for the B61 Life Extension Programs, but the GOP-led House Appropriations Committee provided $23.7 million more than the department asked for. In a report, the committee explained the nuclear program had its funding boosted because it had a ‘troubling history of insufficiently planning for its ongoing production requirements.’ Polis noted that the Air Force had recently doubted the effectiveness of the B61 nuclear bomb. A former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said the bomb was virtually useless, Polis explained. In addition, some European allies no longer wanted the bomb deployed in their country.”
“The official explanation for this upcoming adoption of core-core-CPI which also excludes energy prices in addition to fresh food costs (as core CPI does everywhere else in the world) is to ‘raise the bar’ on Abe’s inflation goal. In reality, it will simply grant the BOJ unlimited ammo to continue injecting liquidity indefinitely because absent exploding energy costs (as we have discussed), inflation in Japan is quite dormant. But what will really happen is that inflation will merely become just one more governmentally-determined and goalseeked economic indicator and policy tool, as it is in the US and China.”
“David examines austerity and its effects on austerity and austerity austerity. Also, austerity is discussed briefly. A note on Reinhart-Rogoff: Who cares? The idea of fiscal responsibility wasn’t created in a Harvard classroom three years ago. (a) we don’t have austerity (b) two people messing up a spreadsheet doesn’t somehow negate the laws of economics. Also, we’ve actually had deficit spending/stimulus. That’s what demonstrably didn’t work. But now that’s seen as the solution once again because of a spreadsheet advocating a policy we don’t follow? It’s too insane to really think about.”
“If you think the federal student-loan program looks like a bad deal for taxpayers, imagine how it would look with honest accounting. And now you don’t need to imagine thanks to a new [CBO] report that’s receiving far too little attention. Turns out that the official ‘savings’ for taxpayers of $184 billion over the next decade really add up to $95 billion in losses.’ The ‘scam’ is that Congress has enabled a huge subsidy for universities while claiming that student loans create huge tax savings, the editorial says. It can make that claim because a 1990 law ‘requires a deliberate under-counting of the cost of defaults,’ the editorial says.”
http://www.moneynews.com/FinanceNews/Student-loan-program-scam/2013/07/04/id/513404
“That you decided to write an entire column grounded solely in baseless innuendo is between you and your editors. But your assertion of several factually false claims about me, Laura Poitras, and others is not. […] Our NSA stories have been published and discussed in countless countries around the world, where they have sparked shock, indignation and demands for investigation. So revealingly, it is only American journalists who have decided to focus their intrepid journalistic attention not on the extremist and legally dubious surveillance behavior of the US government and serial deceit by its top officials, but on those who revealed all of that to the world.”
http://ggsidedocs.blogspot.com.br/2013/07/email-to-walter-pincus.html
“The United States is seriously considering speeding up the withdrawal of its forces from Afghanistan because of frustration with President Hamid Karzai, the New York Times reported. Obama’s relationship with Karzai has been deteriorating and suffered a big and new blow last month with an effort by the United States to open peace talks with the Taliban in Qatar. Karzai opposed the talks, and halted negotiations with the Americans on a long-term security deal needed to keep US forces in Afghanistan after 2014, the Times said.”
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/07/09/u-s-considering-speeding-up-afghan-pullout-nyt-report/
“The Obama administration attempted to sidestep questions over the legality of military aid to Egypt on Monday, claiming it was not in its ‘best interests’ to decide yet whether the armed overthrow of the country’s elected president amounted to a coup or not. US law prevents any administration providing support to the leaders of a military coup, but the White House announced it will not suspend foreign aid to Egypt for now, pending further review. ‘We have had a long relationship with Egypt and the Egyptian people and it would not be wise to abruptly change our assistance programme,’ said spokesman Jay Carney.”