Weekday NEWS to Comfort the Disturbed and Disturb the Comfortable.

Friday 08.27.2010

Is It Just Me Or Is 2010 Feeling A Lot Like 2008?
Graham Summers - SilverBearCafe.com
Haven't we been here before?
One of the strangest aspects of history is that it not only repeats itself but that the repeats often come in rapid succession. Today, the entire financial world is repeating the 2008 debacle on a sovereign basis and few if any commentators seem to sense it.
Weird isn't it? The 2008 Autumn debacle happened less than two years ago. The policy response to it was to simply shift garbage debt from Wall Street to the Federal Reserve, suspend accounting standards, and pump the financial system with TRILLIONS of Dollars (NONE of which fundamentally addressed any of the problems causing the crisis) and yet grown adults with fancy titles and degrees actually believed that the issues were FIXED.

Fed in emergency bid to put bailout ruling on hold
(Reuters) - The Federal Reserve asked a U.S. appeals court to delay implementing a ruling that would force the central bank to disclose details of its emergency lending programs to banks during the financial crisis.
Wednesday's emergency request for a 90-day delay came after the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals on August 20 denied a motion by the Fed to rehear the case, which had been brought by Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News, and News Corp's Fox News Network.
A stay would give the Fed and the Clearing House Association, a group of major U.S. and European banks, until November 18 to appeal the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Fed programs were designed to shore up the financial markets, and more than doubled the central bank's balance sheet to well over $2 trillion, especially after the September 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.

Bernanke, Trichet Economic Paths May Diverge at Jackson Hole
By Simon Kennedy and Scott Lanman
Aug. 27 (Bloomberg) -- Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet, who united to fight the worst global recession in six decades, may be diverging over the outlook for their economies.
The Bernanke-led Fed, while saying U.S. growth would be slower than anticipated, announced on Aug. 10 it will buy Treasuries to set a $2.05 trillion floor on its balance sheet and keep interest rates from rising. Trichet said Aug. 5 that the euro-area economy was surpassing forecasts, which may pave the way for the ECB to look at phasing out its emergency lending measures.

In Jackson Hole, a laid-back retreat with some serious policymaking
By Neil Irwin - WashingtonPost.com
JACKSON, Wyo. -- I'm in Grand Teton National Park for the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City's annual economic symposium, one of the most important events for the world's makers of monetary policy.
The conference itself begins this evening, though participants started trickling in last night. It is an odd scene here in the lobby of the Jackson Lake Lodge, which is an awfully good place to be for economic groupies (if such people exist). Right now, Axel Weber and Allan Meltzer are in quiet conversation across the room. Nearby is a guy trying to get his kids organized to go hiking, almost certainly oblivious to the fact that he is standing next to the second-most powerful central banker in Europe and the leading historian of the Federal Reserve.

Fed Seeks Delay of Bank Data Release While Considering Appeal
By Bob Ivry and David Glovin
Aug. 26 (Bloomberg) -- The Federal Reserve Board sought to delay the court-ordered release of documents identifying banks that might have failed without the U.S. government bailout while it considers an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Fed asked the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York yesterday to delay implementation of a ruling that compels the central bank to release the documents.
"The stay is necessary to permit the board to consult with the Department of Justice regarding an appeal to the Supreme Court," Fed spokesman David Skidmore said.
The appeals court on Aug. 20 denied the Fed's request to reconsider its decision requiring it to release records of the $2 trillion U.S. loan program.

Audit the Fed!!!
Posted by WARREN MOSLER - MoslerEconomics.com
The Fed should offer full transparency. These are the reasons the Fed gives for secrecy:
"The Fed argued that allowing disclosure could stigmatize banks, causing a loss of confidence that could lead to deposit runs, bank failures and damage to the economy."
The fact that the Fed fears a liquidity crisis is evidence that it doesn't understand banking.
With the FDIC offering deposit insurance for up to 100% of any bank's liabilities, it should be clear to the Fed the liability side of banking is not the place for market discipline. Liquidity should not be an issue and it should be provided in unlimited quantities at all times, much like most of the rest of the world's central banks have been doing for a long time.

Fresh flight to Swiss franc as Europe's bond strains return
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard - Telegraph.co.uk
The Swiss franc has surged to an all-time high against the euro on capital flight from the eurozone after Irish, Greek, and Portuguese bonds came under renewed fire.
Yields on 10-year Swiss bonds fell to 1.02pc as investors flocked into the ultimate safe-haven asset, now outperforming gold.
No country in the developed world apart form Japan has ever seen 10-year yields drop below 1pc. Rates remained significantly higher during the two great depressions of the 1870s and the 1930s.
Within the eurozone investors turned to German Bunds, pushing yields to an historical low of 2.11pc. The search for safety seems driven by swirling mix of fears over a double-dip recession in the US, austerity overkill across the West, and sovereign debt worries on the eurozone periphery.

Fed's Bernanke Running Out of Options
WRITTEN BY BOB ADELMANN - The New American
When Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke speaks on Friday at the Fed's annual meeting in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Fed-watchers from around the world will be hanging on his every word, phrase, and nuance for clues. They'll be listening to hear that the chairman knows what's happening in the economy, and that if things get worse, he has a plan.
The economy continues to suffer as shown by weak demand for housing, high unemployment, and declines in hard goods manufacturing. As Randall Forsythe put it, "Every data point on employment and housing since midyear has fallen short of expectations, in some cases, far short." The numbers just released by the National Association of Realtors for July were horrific, despite the Fed's efforts to "re-flate" the housing market, as Tom Eddlem pointed out.

Cancer & Desperation of QE2
By: Jim Willie CB, GoldSeek.com
History is being made. The American public has never been so nervous, perhaps fearful of something dreadful and imminent. The global monetary system is crumbling. The typical stimulus has failed to jumpstart the USEconomy. The 20 months of near 0% short-term official interest rate has failed to revive the moribund US housing market. The phony FASB accounting rules has failed to accomplish anything except a stay of execution for the big US banks, which do not lend much. In fact, the US banks are largely dead entities showing enough life for to receive USGovt largesse aid. Witness the failure of the US financial sector. Witness the climax chapter of failure for the Fascist Business Model. The US banker brain trust, which possesses only a modicum of economic wisdom, analytic prowess, or foresight, finds itself in a desperate corner. Their talk of an Exit Strategy in the last several months was summarily dismissed as nonsense, propaganda, and wishful thinking by the Jackass here on a consistent irrefutable basis. The US Federal Reserve is ready to embark on the second round of Quantitative Easing. The monetization of US$-based bonds of many types will be done on a second initiative, on cue. Here is the irony, the stupidity, the insanity, the recklessness, the tragedy. What failed, they will do again, maybe even bigger! At risk is global confidence and trust, hardly a zero cost item.

UK bank accounting rules 'fatally flawed',
warns influential watchdog
By Louise Armitstead - Telegraph.co.uk
The Government has been warned of a "regulatory fiasco" in which British banks have apparently adhered to flawed reporting standards for more than five years.
An influential watchdog has written to the Department of Business listing a catalogue of staggering regulatory errors that allegedly contributed to the collapse of several banks in 2008 - and still threatens the system today.
While reviewing the proposed expansion of the International Financial Reporting Standards for accounting, Tim Bush, a member of the "Urgent Issues Task Force" that scrutinises the work of the Accounting Standards Board (ASB), claims to have uncovered "fatal" and "dangerous" flaws in the system.

Economy Entering 5-Year Period of Stagnation?
U.S. News and World Report's Rick Newman argues the U.S. economy has entered a period of no growth.

Gold demand robust in 2010
CommodityOnline.com
Demand for gold will remain robust during 2010 as a result of accelerating demand from India and China, as well as increasing global investment demand driven by continuing uncertainty over public debt and economic recovery, the World Gold Council (WGC) said.
According to the WGC's Gold Demand Trends report for Q2 2010, published today, demand for gold for the rest of 2010 will be underpinned by the following market forces:

My Take on Gold
Richard Russell - SilverBearCafe.com
Dennis Gartman is an experienced commodity trader. Dennis has been very cautious about gold; he "sort of" likes gold, so he calls himself a "gold agnostic." For this reason it's most interesting to read what Dennis says about gold in today's report.
"Turning, then to gold and other metals, prices turned sharply for the better yesterday as the world rushed out of equities and looked for any safe harbors that were available. Certainly the rush to the Swiss franc was obvious, as noted above, and so too the rush into sovereign debt securities. But frankly, the rush was on to gold once again. We remain long what we have referred to as an 'insurance' position in gold, but we own it in terms of EUROs and /or of British pounds sterling, otherwise we remain an agnostic. To assuage our friends who are gold-bug-leaners, we shall not be short of gold. Nothing likely shall ever turn us manifestly bearish of it. But for the moment we are simply hard upon the sidelines, owning only this small 'insurance' position and comfortably in that position.

Precious metals decouple from Dow
NEW JERSEY (Commodity Online): Precious metals have now decoupled from the Dow Jones Industrial Index with Dow falling 6.1% from its high on August 9th, along with both gold and silver rising by about 3.3% during the same period.
A year ago we would consistently see precious metals and stock market prices rise and fall in parallel, according to National Inflation Association (NIA).
The Dow Jones to gold ratio is now down to 8.1, near its low for 2010 of 7.9. The gold to silver ratio still remains at a historically high level of 66. However, silver was up today by $0.65 to $19.03 per ounce, its biggest one day gain since early June. We expect silver to significantly outperform gold in the months to come.

Silver Prices Now Rising Faster Than Gold
By: Peter J. Cooper - SilverSeek.com
August is usually a quiet month in the precious metals market but this month is different. Silver has started behaving 100 per cent like a precious metal and not as an industrial commodity, and while stocks and Dr Copper have been falling, silver has been outperforming gold which is also on the up.
What is going on here? This is actually fully consistent with the bullion market rumors about the bank cartel unwinding its silver futures positions in the quietest month of the year.

The Ethics of Gold
By Ron Robins - alrroya.com
The rising price of gold stands as the ethical barometer of the mismanagement of our fiscal, monetary, and currency systems. Gold is in the early stages of re-asserting its historic role of helping to bring order to monetary and currency chaos. Its price has risen more than fourfold over the past ten years as a result of investors anticipating the predictable financial and currency chaos we have today-and what is likely yet to come.
The central banks and government treasuries, particularly those of the US, Europe, and Japan, have been weakened and our trust in them eroded. For decades they assured us that only they and their paper currencies and fractional reserve banking systems can keep our economies growing forever. They are now failing for all to see. And before the ships of state sink and economies further submerge they bail out their banking friends.

The Economy When Debt Is Everywhere
Bob Chapman - The International Forecaster
Greece forced into a harsh reality, madness, next is Spain, Portugal and Italy to be sold to IMF servitude for decades, twenty countries now headed into bankruptcy, no relief from unemployment, reduced US GDP, a million jobs to be lost... nightmares for the economy ahead.
Debt is everywhere and it certainly is onerous. We all have heard about the sovereign debt crisis, the debt of Greece and the debts of Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Italy. During that process the euro fell from $1.50 to $1.187; which gave euro zone exporters quite an advantage. The euro has since rebounded to a high of $1.33 and for now settled in near $1.28. Business confidence is back, but in the meantime the next course of action is to be higher taxes and austerity. Even consumers believe things are not going to improve. They all probably see the advantages of a cheaper euro. Even the CDS premiums have disappeared, which means at least for now the crisis has been arrested with a Band-Aid called loans - loans that will take these countries years to repay accompanied by years of depression. As a result, Greece is on the edge of revolt.

Bob Chapman on Radio Liberty 23 Aug 2010

Obama confers with economic team
by Mike Memoli - The Swamp - Chicago Tribune
President Obama was silent yesterday as the White House punched back at House Minority Leader John Boehner, who in a major speech called on the president to dismiss his economic team.
Today, the White House released a so-called "readout" of a call Obama held with that team, which seemed in part another response to Boehner's remarks and a vote of confidence for his advisers.

Dollar May Extend Decline to Below 70 Yen
By Yoshiaki Nohara and Hiroko Komiya
Aug. 27 (Bloomberg) -- The dollar may drop to less than 70 yen, surpassing a record low reached in 1995, Mizuho Corporate Bank Ltd. said, citing trading patterns.
A weekly ichimoku chart shows the U.S. currency has been in a downtrend since it reached this year's high of 94.99 yen in May, said Hiroyuki Tanaka, chief technical analyst in Tokyo at the unit of Japan's second-largest bank. A daily ichimoku chart signals any gains in the dollar will be limited as the currency stays below the so-called conversion line and baseline, he said.

Blackstone urges court to throw out IPO appeal
By Jonathan Stempel -
(Reuters) - Blackstone Group LP urged a federal appeals court not to revive an investor lawsuit accusing it of hiding bad investments before raising $4.7 billion in its 2007 initial public offering.
A lawyer for the private equity firm argued that U.S. securities laws did not require the private equity firm to disclose expansive details about hundreds of investments that it believed the investors sought.
But investor's attorney David Brower countered that U.S. District Judge Harold Baer was wrong to dismiss the lawsuit in September 2009.
"Blackstone has the obligation to report significantly negative, and even significantly positive, results," Brower, a partner at Brower Piven PC, told the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York.

Economic Armageddon:
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Double Dip is Here!
Pravda.ru [caveat lector]
The worst nightmare forecast by economic specialists over the previous years has come true: new research by economic gurus in the United States of America has revealed a bleak scenario: the United States' economy is in a state of depression. Yes, it is the Double Dip, a roller-coaster ride to economic catastrophe and it has arrived. To come: massive debt default, the failure of entire nations and widespread starvation in the western world.
The research referring to the works of a number of leading economists (David Rosenberg, Fred Harrison, Arthur Laffer, Nobel Prizewinner Paul Krugman, Robin Griffiths) is revealed in the article by US based analyst and writer, Terrence Aym*. And it makes terrifying reading.
While these leading economists represent different views from opposite ends of the political spectrums both in the USA and the UK, on one thing they agree: the decade ahead is going to get worse.

The Rise and Fall of the U.S.S.A.?
WRITTEN BY CHRISTIAN GOMEZ - The New American
In the latest issue of Trends Journal Gerald Celente, the founder and director of Trends Research Institute and also bestselling author of Trends 2000 and Trends Tracking, writes that the United States is walking down the same road of demise as the former Soviet Union.
Celente further elaborated on this point in a recent video "tech-ticker" interview, available online at Yahoo! Finance, saying, "In a lot of ways it's empire decline; they ran the Cold War race and they lost, we're still in the race..."

China Buys Euros as Fear of World Depression Grows
By Webster G. Tarpley
The US Treasury has just announced that China's official holdings of U.S. Treasury securities declined by about $30 billion between April and May of this year, from about $900 billion to some $868 billion. According to the US authorities, this means that Chinese holdings of US government paper are now at the lowest level in the past year. A 2% to 3% decline in a month does not qualify as massive dumping, but simply means that China is in the process of diversification. It is also very likely that China has more U.S. Treasury bonds than this official count would indicate, quite possibly through proxy purchases via Hong Kong and other places.
With the sales of existing homes in the United States falling by 27% this morning, together with disastrous statistics regarding unemployment and foreclosures, it ought to be obvious that the US economy is in depression. Even experts interviewed on CNBC are beginning to wake up to this obvious fact.

Goldman Looks to Move Proprietary Trading Desk

Foreclosures Fall, but Rise in Delinquency Causes Concern
By DAVID STREITFELD - NYTimes.com
The foreclosure crisis finally began to improve in the second quarter, but with the continued weakness in the economy and the recent deterioration of the housing market the gains may prove fleeting, data released Thursday indicated.
For the first time since 2006 the number of loans in the process of foreclosure fell, the Mortgage Bankers Association said.
But the group's chief economist, Jay Brinkmann, said any conclusion that the improvements would continue was premature. "It's more of a hope than anything at this point," he said.

28% of Ga. mortgages underwater
ATLANTA BUSINESS CHRONICLE
Some 28 percent of homeowners in Georgia were underwater in their mortgages in the second quarter.
CoreLogic reported Thursday 449,969 negative equity mortgages out of the Peach State's 1,601,921 total mortgages.
A borrower is in negative equity if he or she owes more on the mortgage than the home is worth.
CoreLogic also reported 11 million, or 23 percent, of all residential properties with mortgages in the United States were in negative equity at the end of the second quarter, down from 11.2 million and 24 percent from the first quarter of 2010. Foreclosures, rather than meaningful price appreciation, were the primary driver in the change in negative equity.

One in 10 mortgage holders faces foreclosure
by Alan Zibel - AP -MSNBC.MSN.com
Government aid efforts having little impact stemming housing crisis
WASHINGTON - One in 10 American households with a mortgage was at risk of foreclosure this summer as the government's efforts to help have had little impact stemming the housing crisis.
About 9.9 percent of homeowners had missed at least one mortgage payment as of June 30, the Mortgage Bankers Association said Thursday.
That number, which is adjusted for seasonal factors, was down slightly from a record-high of more than 10 percent as of April 30.

Real Estate: No New McMansions Sold in July
By DAN BURROWS - DailyFinance.com
Not only did new-home sales plunge in July to a record low going back to 1963, but the McMansion market saw no activity whatsoever -- for the second month in a row.
As David Rosenberg, the presciently bearish chief economist and strategist at Canadian asset manager Gluskin Sheff told clients Thursday: "The high-end market, in particular, is under tremendous pressure. In fact, it is becoming non-existent."
Not a single new home priced above $750,000 sold in July or June, Rosenberg notes. As for houses priced between $500,000 and $750,000, only 1,000 new units were sold last month. When it comes to new homes that did find buyers in July, more than 80% were priced under $300,000.

Procrastination on Foreclosures, Now 'Blatant,' May Backfire
By Jeff Horwitz and Kate Berry - AmericanBanker.com
Ever since the housing collapse began, market seers have warned of a coming wave of foreclosures that would make the already heightened activity look like a trickle.
The dam would break when moratoriums ended, teaser rates expired, modifications failed and banks finally trained the army of specialists needed to process the volume.
But the flood hasn't happened. The simple reason is that servicers are not initiating or processing foreclosures at the pace they could be.

Foreclosures fall but new delinquencies up: MBA
By Al Yoon
(Reuters) - The number of U.S. homes headed for foreclosure fell during the second quarter, marking the first such drop since the housing slump began in 2006, but the improvement may be fleeting as the number of newly delinquent homeowners rose, a banking group said on Wednesday.
The percentage of loans in the foreclosure process declined last quarter to 4.57 percent from 4.63 percent in the first quarter, partly because of lender efforts to ease payments for homeowners and the impact of temporary home purchase tax credits, the Mortgage Bankers Association said in a report.

New home sales fall to record low
By Alejandro Lazo, Los Angeles Times
July's annualized sales rate of 276,000 units was the lowest since the government began keeping track in 1963.
Sales of new homes unexpectedly sank 12.4% in July to the lowest point since government records starting being kept in 1963. It underscored continued weakness in the housing market, which tanked after the expiration this spring of a tax break for home buyers who were already facing a stagnant job market.
The Commerce Department said Wednesday that new single-family houses in July were sold at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 276,000 units. It marked a 32.4% drop from the same month a year ago.

Keiser Report No:72

Credit Card Rates Push the Envelope
By: Rick Ackerman - GoldSeek.com
You've got to wonder what the banks have in mind now that they've raised credit card rates to an average 14.7 percent, up 160 basis points from a year ago. Are lenders perhaps trying to tell us that they are no longer interested in advancing cash to users of plastic? After all, what shopper or diner would borrow a dime with a credit card if it carried such an exorbitant interest charge? And even if there were borrowers at such usurious rates, how many of them could be counted on to service their loans indefinitely (which is how long it would take to pay off such loans)? It's not as though the banks can go after delinquent borrowers with such time-honored tools of the loan shark as baseball bats, brass-buckled belts and straight razors.

10 Big Retailers Closing Stores
By MERCEDES CARDONA - DailyFinance.com
Your next shopping trip may not be as convenient as it used to be. The second quarter earnings season brought news from several major retailers that they will be shutting down stores. Both Saks (SKS) and Abercrombie & Fitch (ANF) said they were closing stores in several parts of the country. Meanwhile, other stores like the struggling Blockbuster video rental chain, continue to slash stores by the dozens. American Apparel (APP), which is close to defaulting on its loans, just may be next.
Consumers just aren't shopping the way they used to. Even Wal-Mart Stores (WMT), which typically fares well during tough economic times, is worried. "The slow economic recovery will continue to affect our customers, and we expect they will remain cautious about spending," said president and CEO Mike Duke in a statement that was released during the company's second quarter earnings report.

Blockbuster tells Hollywood studios it's preparing for mid-September bankruptcy
LATimes.com
After dominating the home video rental business for more than a decade and struggling to survive in recent years against upstarts Netflix and Redbox, Blockbuster Inc. is preparing to file for bankruptcy next month, according to people who have been briefed on the matter.
Executives from Blockbuster and its senior debt holders last week held meetings with the six major movie studios to discuss their intention to enter a "pre-planned" bankruptcy in mid-September, said several people familiar with the situation who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of ongoing talks.

America's Millionaires Are Feeling More Bearish
Tim Iacono - SeekingAlpha.com
U.S. investors with assets in seven or more figures are not feeling nearly as chipper about the domestic state of affairs as they were over the last year or so, that is, when stock prices were generally rising. Reuters reports on how their mood has soured.
The Spectrem millionaire investor confidence index fell to its lowest level in more than a year in August as wealthy U.S. investors worried about politics and unemployment, according to Spectrem Group.

Desperate Consumers Stop Paying Mortgages
in Order to Pay Credit Cards
By CHARLES WALLACE - DailyFinance.com
Normally, it would be considered a positive sign that people are reducing their credit card debt load. But a series of statistical releases this week confirms an ominous new trend among desperate consumers: They have stopped paying their mortgages but are continuing to pay off their credit cards so they can continue to buy staples, like food.
"People are trying to free up cash so they have it on a daily basis," says Theodore W. Connolly, a bankruptcy attorney in Boston who has just published a new book on the problem, The Road Out of Debt: Bankruptcies and Other Solutions to Your Financial Problems. "People are getting fearful again and are worrying about just paying for their groceries and doing the laundry."

The Hidden Income Tax Surcharge
By James Schaefer - WeElectedYou.org
Think you are in the 15% tax bracket, or the 25% tax bracket? Think again.
The tax rates for Social Security and Medicare total 15.3%, and have been at that level for the past twenty years. Most workers only see half that figure deducted from their paychecks, but if your employer didn't have to give 7.65% of your salary to the government he could give it to you.
The $2.5 trillion Social Security trust fund doesn't really have $2.5 trillion in it, because all the money is invested in Treasury Bonds. A Treasury bond is a loan to the government, and it goes without saying that our congressmen spent the borrowed money as soon as they got their hands on it. Future payments to Social Security beneficiaries will have to be paid from future taxes.

The Social Security Obligation
By James Schaefer - WeElectedYou.org
Dr. Krugman's comment about "people who . . . are itching to dismantle Social Security" is an interesting one. It would appear that government has already done this over the past forty years, using the Social Security trust fund to cover federal budget shortfalls. The well is now dry, and making Social Security solvent can only be done at additional future expense to taxpayers.
Taxpayers will now have to pay twice to fund Social Security, the first time out of their paychecks during their working years, and - starting this year - yet again, to pay back the IOUs to keep the system running.

The U.S. Labor Force Is Being Killed Off
Ever wonder what Obama really means by a "jobless recovery"? It means that the British are killing off the U.S. labor force with their Nazi policies of "creative destruction," and trying to convince you that it's good, and that we're in a "recovery."
How bad is real unemployment? Worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s, and rapidly deteriorating. Most people try to determine unemployment by accretion of categories: official unemployment + underemployed + part time workers + discouraged workers + this + that. But that misses the actual picture, which only emerges when you take the top-down approach developed by LaRouche's science of physical economy.

Obama jobs death toll watch: More health care layoffs
By Michelle Malkin
I said yesterday in my Beltway Chainsaw Massacre column that the GOP needs to track the Obama jobs death toll and tell the victims' stories far and wide.
But there's no need to wait for the GOP. I'll keep doing it right here.
The first story of the day comes from the Fort Worth Star Telegram in Texas, where a health insurer called Health Markets has laid off 70 workers and expects up to 180 more as it braces for the costs of Obamacare and other government mandates:
HealthMarkets, the North Richland Hills-based seller of health insurance, laid off 70 employees this month and expects to trim 180 more positions by the end of the first quarter of 2011, according to a recent federal filing.

Health Insurer Cash Shifts to Favor Republicans Before Election
By Drew Armstrong
Aug. 26 (Bloomberg) -- Health insurers led by WellPoint Inc. are backing Republicans with campaign donations by an 8-to - 1 margin, favoring the party that's promised to repeal President Barack Obama's health-care overhaul if it wins back Congress.
WellPoint, along with Coventry Health Care Inc. and Humana Inc., gave Republican candidates $315,000 from May through July, according to U.S. Federal Election Commission records. That compares with $41,000 given to Democrats by the three companies as the parties near November elections that will determine who controls the U.S. House and Senate next year.

Can GOP Repeal Parts of Health-Care Reform?
Galen Institute President Grace Marie Turner on what measures in the health-care law a Republican House might be able to overturn.

A Relativist, Wrapped in a Muslim, Inside an Agnostic
George Neumayr - The American Spectator
Why does a significant chunk of the American electorate think Obama is a Muslim? Let's count some of the reasons: he speaks of his "Muslim roots," says he hails from "generations of Muslims," was born to a line of Muslim males and given by them an Arabic name, went to a Muslim school in Islamic Indonesia, speaks glowingly of Islam whenever he gets the chance, holds a Ramadan dinner in the White House, tells his NASA head to turn the space agency into a Muslim outreach program, and last but not least insults doctrinal Christians routinely.
The voice of the people is the voice of God, the pander bears and demagogues of the left usually say. But not on this one. With great impatience they have appeared on cable shows this week to lecture the American people on Obama's "real" religion. Has the left-wing chattering class ever been more eager to pronounce a president Christian?

Rotten Eggs and Our Broken Democracy
By Amy Goodman - Truthdig.com
What do a half-billion eggs have to do with democracy? The massive recall of salmonella-infected eggs, the largest egg recall in U.S. history, opens a window on the power of large corporations over not only our health, but over our government.
While scores of brands have been recalled, they all can be traced back to just two egg farms. Our food supply is increasingly in the hands of larger and larger companies, which wield enormous power in our political process. As with the food industry, so, too, is it with oil and with banks: Giant corporations, some with budgets larger than most nations, are controlling our health, our environment, our economy and increasingly, our elections.

Sheriff Babeu:
It's 'An Outrage' Obama Stopped Building Border Fence
By Terence P. Jeffrey, Editor-in-Chief - CNSNews.com
(CNSNews.com) - Sheriff Paul Babeu of Pinal County, Ariz., says it is "an outrage" the Obama administration has stopped building the double-fencing needed to assist the Border Patrol in securing the U.S.-Mexico border and says it is time for the United States to begin fighting illegal immigration and drug smuggling directly at the border instead of within the country where it harms American citizens and communities.
By the time Obama was inaugurated in January 2009, according to the Justice Department, only 108 miles of the 262-mile-long Arizona portion of the 2,000-mile-long U.S.-Mexico border had been fenced.

Debt Burden for Squirrels
by Michael Smith - WeElectedYou.org
Just watched an ABC News feature on the rope bridges Arizona will construct to keep Mount Graham red squirrels from becoming roadkill. The bridges are expected to save five squirrels per year, at a cost of $1.25 million. The funding will be provided by-wait for it-the Federal Highway Administration!
Show of hands here-who would borrow money from China to do this?

Gulf Oil Spill: Rick Steiner Got BP Disaster Right From The Beginning, Warns Crisis Is Far From Over
Dan Froomkin - SilverBearCafe.com
I first spoke to Rick Steiner more than three months ago - about two weeks into the Deepwater Horizon disaster - after a source recommended I talk to him for a story I was writing about the spill as a teachable moment. Steiner is a marine conservationist and activist in Alaska who started studying oil spills when the Exxon Valdez ran aground in 1989, and never stopped.
What Steiner said to me during that first interview was blunt, depressing - and struck me as having the ring of truth. Little did I know how true.
"Government and industry will habitually understate the volume of the spill and the impact, and they will overstate the effectiveness of the cleanup and their response," he told me at the time. "There's no such thing as an effective response. There's never been an effective response - ever - where more than 10 or 20 percent of the oil is ever recovered from the water.

"We're seeing way more dispersant than ever before" Large, thick oil plumes, freshly sprayed with poison!
by Alex - The IntelHub.com
Today, Project Gulf Impact is out on the waters in and around Orange Beach Alabama. What they have found is exactly the opposite of what BP and the federal government have told the American people. Not only did they find oil but they apparently found what looks to be freshly sprayed dispersant, still in powder form.
Why is this toxic dispersant still being sprayed? Warnings from scientists and independent journalists have indicated that Corexit could effect the gulf for at least twenty years.

Gulf Chemist: Mercenaries Hired By BP Are Now Applying
Toxic Dispersant at Night and In an Uncontrolled Manner -
Which BP Says It No Longer Uses
Washington's Blog
Bob Naman is an analytical chemist with almost 30 years in the field, based in Mobile, Alabama. When WKRG News 5 gave Naman samples of water from the Gulf of Mexico, Naman found oil contamination, and one of his samples actually exploded during testing due - he believes - to the presence of methane gas or Corexit, the dispersant that BP has been using in the Gulf: [see video]
But the story only starts there.
A few days ago, Naman was sent a sample of water from Cotton Bayou, Alabama. Naman found 13.3 parts per million of the dispersant Corexit in the sample: [see video]
That's a little perplexing, given that Admiral Thad Allen said on August 9th that dispersants have not been used in the Gulf since mid-July:
We have not used dispersant since the capping stack was put on. I believe that was the 15th of July.

BP's Wells Says He Doesn't Know Who Was in Charge
By Joe Carroll and Katarzyna Klimasinska
Aug. 26 (Bloomberg) -- BP Plc'sKent Wells, a senior vice president who joined the Gulf of Mexico oil-spill response two days after it began four months ago, said he doesn't know who was in charge aboard the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig when it exploded in April.
Wells told a federal panel today in Houston that he was concentrating on halting the spill and coordinating the cleanup, rather than examining who may have been at fault in the disaster that killed 11 people and spewed an estimated 4.9 million barrels of crude from the damaged Macondo well.

Key Karzai Aide in Corruption Inquiry Is Linked to C.I.A.
By DEXTER FILKINS and MARK MAZZETTI - NYTimes.com
KABUL, Afghanistan - The aide to President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan at the center of a politically sensitive corruption investigation is being paid by the Central Intelligence Agency, according to Afghan and American officials.
Mohammed Zia Salehi, the chief of administration for the National Security Council, appears to have been on the payroll for many years, according to officials in Kabul and Washington. It is unclear exactly what Mr. Salehi does in exchange for his money, whether providing information to the spy agency, advancing American views inside the presidential palace, or both.

Is Iraq About to Fall to Iran?
By Joel Hilliker | theTrumpet.com
Iraq is headless, and America is leaving.
Since 2003, the U.S. has sacrificed over 4,400 of its soldiers and spent over a trillion dollars in Iraq. What is there to show for these enormous costs?
Iraq is bedlam. Violence continues to percolate. July was the country's deadliest month since May 2008. Five and a half months after elections, a government still has not formed. In the meantime, the prime minister has agreed not to make any major decisions about Iraq's future.
This is a shell of a country. Ripe for conquest.

The U.S. Wants to Save the World From Terrorism,
Who Will Save the World from the U.S.?
Iza’as Almada is a writer and columnist for the NR
The arrogance and the false air of superiority with which the U.S. government behaves in the contemporary world, besides tiring, are becoming a danger to the survival of humanity. To my knowledge, except for the few countries whose governments maintain a totally submissive stance to the interests of Americans (and I refer to the heads of Colombia, Costa Rica, Saudi Arabia and South Korea as the most significant examples), none of us mortals gave procuration to Washington to think and act on our behalf.
This "fight against terrorism," to "defend democracy" and the "war on drugs" already does not convince anyone. Who wants to cheat Uncle Sam? Fight against terrorism? But who armed the Taliban? Who created Osama Bin Laden? Who tortures innocents in Guantanamo Bay? Who supported the majority of the military coups in Latin America in the '50s, '60s and '70s and the recent coup in Honduras? Who supported Operation Condor and practiced terrorist attacks in the Southern Cone? Who financed terrorists like Posada Carriles, who lives in exile in the U.S.?

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