RUTHFULLY YOURS

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has a growing list of enemies. “Among his targets” at a recent address to a Turkish business group “were The New York Times, the Gezi events of 2013, credit rating agencies, the Hizmet movement, the Koc family and high interest rates,” Zamanreported September 18. Erdoğan earlier had threatened to expel rating agencies Moody’s and Fitch from Turkey if they persisted in making negative comments about Turkey’s credit.

Turkey’s financial position is one of the world’s great financial mysteries, in fact, a uniquely opaque puzzle: the country has by far the biggest foreign financing requirement relative to GDP among all the world’s large economies, yet the sources of its financing are impossible to trace.

Source: Bloomberg

Source: Central Bank of Turkey

I have analyzed sovereign debt risk for three decades – including stints as head of credit strategy at Credit Suisse and head of debt research at Bank of America – and have never seen anything quite like this.

At around 8% of GDP, Turkey’s current account deficit is a standout among emerging markets. It is at the level of Greece before its near-bankruptcy in 2011. Where is the money coming from to cover it?

A great deal of it is financed by short-term debt, mainly through borrowings by banks.

Little of this appears on the Bank for International Settlements tables of Western banks’ short-term lending to other banks, which means that the source of the bank loans lies elsewhere than in the developed world. Gulf State banks are almost certainly the lenders, by process of elimination.

Recently, as the above chart shows, the rate of growth of bank borrowing has tapered off. What has replaced bank loans?

When I first reported on the racially motivated law enforcement of Holder’s Justice Department, it seemed fanciful to some. But after six years of Holder hugging Al Sharpton, stoking racial division in places like Florida and Ferguson, after suing police and fire departments to impose racial hiring requirements, after refusing to enforce election laws that protect white victims or require voter rolls to be cleaned, after launching harassing litigation against peaceful pro-life protesters, after incident after incident of dishonesty and contempt before Congress — after all this, it was clear to anyone with any intellectual honesty that this man had a vision of the law at odds with the nation’s traditions.

Why would it surprise anyone he behaved as he did? As I made clear in my book Injustice, he carried around a quote in his wallet for 40 years about race that, he explained to the Washington Post, indicated that he had common cause with the black criminal. That’s a fact. That’s who he is.

And few in the House knew how to hold him accountable. Some who did are Rep. John Culberson (R-TX), Rep Frank Wolf (R-Va), Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ), Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) and Rep. Daryl Issa (R-CA). Unfortunately, too many others failed to understand what they were up against.

Eric Holder was a radical progressive who used the power of the federal government to impose his progressivism on the United States. He loved big interventionist government that took sides based on your politics and your race. He was a menace to the rule of law.

So he exits. But instead of being shamed into obscurity as he ought to be, he will cash in. He’ll abandon the tools of dividing Americans between black and white and worry about a new color: gold. When Holder lands at a big and shameless lawfirm in Washington, D.C., it will say as much about the country in 2014 as Holder’s rancid tenure said about the modern Democratic Party.

That someone like Eric Holder can find a lucrative career in this town, and be feted at all the right cocktail parties, says a great deal about what we have lost as a nation. In another era, a man like Holder, unmoored from the law and the truth would not have a future. Instead, I suspect Holder has a very bright one.

Those of you clamoring for “indictments” or “prosecution” of the man can give up. It isn’t going to happen. Nothing is going to happen to him, except that he will move on to a job that even most “1 percenters” wouldn’t recognize.

A Chilling Conversation With an Islamic State Terrorist: We Will ‘Make Some Attacks in New York Soon’

Read more: Family Security Matters http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/blog/detail/a-chilling-conversation-with-an-islamic-state-terrorist-we-will-make-some-attacks-in-new-york-soon#ixzz3EQLwcJ5L

President Obama’s decision to reference the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., during a United Nations speech on foreign affairs Wednesday raised eyebrows, and not just because the investigation is ongoing.

After spending the bulk of his remarks discussing the ethnic and religious disputes that fuel so much of the world’s terrorism, the president mentioned the Ferguson shooting and then added, “So, yes, we have our own racial and ethnic tensions” and “like every country, we continually wrestle with how to reconcile the vast changes wrought by globalization and greater diversity with the traditions that we hold dear.”

Politico reported that it was “unusual” for the president to reference “domestic U.S. shortcomings during a speech devoted to international issues.” Asked for an explanation, a White House official said the president wanted to acknowledge that the U.S. is “not perfect.”

Well, neither is Mr. Obama’s analogy.

Tensions between the police and low-income black communities are not based on race or ethnicity. They are based on the fact that blacks commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime in America—almost all of it directed at other blacks. Police don’t go into these communities to shoot blacks; they are there, by and large, to stop blacks from shooting each other. They are there because that is where the 911 calls originate. And for their troubles they now have the president of the United States all but comparing them to terrorist groups.

This is the latest example of the president exploiting Ferguson to rile up black voters, whom Democrats fear will stay home in November. It is of a piece with the multiple, redundant federal investigations into the shooting. The Obama administration knows full well that Bull Connor doesn’t run the Ferguson police department, but it will to pretend that’s the case to score political points with the president’s base.

This week’s United Nations anticarbon summit featured more than the usual share of political fun like drum troupes and a Wall Street rally with the official slogan of “Stop Capitalism.” But the most amusing gesture may have been Mayor Bill de Blasio’s pledge to chop New York City emissions by 80% by 2050.

“We know humanity is facing an existential threat,” Mr. de Blasio said at the Turtle Bay event, giving even Al Gore competition for climate calamity. “No one is spared. And our mutual need to survive should instill in us a kind of unity we so rarely experience.”

The city will no doubt need unity, not to mention a few spare trillion dollars of capital spending. Most of greater New York’s emissions are the result of energy consumption by the city’s office and residential buildings. Mr. de Blasio plans to get started by retrofitting city-owned property such as public housing to be more energy efficient, such as installing better insulation and solar panels on the roof. Private real-estate owners are merely encouraged to go green for now, but the Mayor promised at a press conference that “if we don’t see progress, we will certainly move to mandate.”

The carbon levels Mr. de Blasio favors were probably last seen in New York around the time of the Civil War or before, given that the region was until recently home to so much 20th-century heavy industry. On present trend, metro emissions will reach 55.7 million metric tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent by 2050. Mr. de Blasio favors 10.2 million tons, which in today’s world is equal to the annual energy use of about 3.4 million average homes. Barring a technology miracle, the mayor will have to stop not merely capitalism but the laws of thermodynamics.

Such antirealism is the hallmark of the climate lobby, but the irony is particularly thick in the case of Mr. de Blasio, whose main theme is income inequality and New York’s “two cities.” Who does he think is going to pay for his green utopia? It won’t be the Manhattan rich but the poor and middle class.

For logic-minded Americans still genuinely puzzled as to how it could be that our presidents and secretaries of state and generals and pundits keep hammering home the big lie that Islam has nothing to do with jihad, that the religion of conquest is a “religion of peace,” I have a special warning. Such widespread, politics- and mass-media-driven brainwashing is nothing new.

Just as today’s opinion-makers seek to divorce Islam from its impact — for example, brutal conquest, forced conversion, religiously sanctioned sex slavery, beheadings — past opinion-makers worked equally hard to divorce communism from its impact — for example, brutal conquest, forced collectivization, concentration camps (Gulags), mass murder.

It worked. Unlike Nazism, communism has never been judged guilty or even held responsible for the carnage and suffering it has caused. On the contrary, it remains a source of “liberal” statist ideas such as Obamacare. My book “American Betrayal” delves deeply into this dangerous double standard. In short, it not only enables collectivist policies to strangle our remnant republic, but also explains why American students can find a drink called Leninade, emblazoned with a hammer and sickle, for sale on a college campus. It is also why silkscreens of Warhol’s Chairman Mao, history’s top mass murderer, are sought-after items for the homes of the wealthy.

There are no such trendy portraits of Hitler, and who would want them? Who would want to swig a bottle of Hitlerpop, decorated with a swastika? So, why Leninade? Not only does the stench of death not follow the Communist murder-cult, the brand lives.

Barring a groundswell of common sense, I predict that Islam, the brand, will most likely remain separate in the public mind from the violence and repression it causes and has caused for more than a millennium. That’s certainly the direction leaders from both political parties have been relentlessly herding us in for over a decade, insisting against all reason — against all sacred Islamic texts — that “Islam is peace.”

This means that not only must we contend with this cycle of expansionist jihad — a recurrence that should be familiar from Islamic history were it, too, not subject to whitewash — we must simultaneously withstand a campaign of lies designed to subvert our understanding of how Islam, in fact, has everything to do with beheadings and other violence both in the Islamic world and in the West.

They arrived on five hundred and fifty diesel-polluting buses and carbon dioxide emitting planes. Three hundred thousand paraded in the streets of New York in a People’s Climate March that was organized by Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org. It was a rally against man-caused climate change, but also included those who were demonstrating against fracking. (Keep in mind, it has been lower natural gas prices, a consequence of fracking, which has allowed the U.S. to take the lead in reducing emissions.)

Among the marchers were celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio. Mr. DiCaprio, taking time out from yachting with Arab oil sheiks, arrived on his private plane. His jet, of course, emits more tons of carbon dioxide in one trip than the average person does in two months. While carrying signs indicating their commitment to the environment (one of which read: “clean water is a right, not a luxury”), they saw nothing hypocritical in littering the street with at least one hundred tons of garbage. Like their political antecedent, Occupy Wall Street, they see no connection between creed and behavior.

Like Canute, naïfs are convinced that nature can be tamed by eating organic foods, driving a Prius, and getting electricity from wind farms, with little care or understanding of the costs. At the other end of the climate spectrum, extremists like Al Gore and Naomi Klein are simply charlatans. They publically endorse the message: “Climate change is the symptom; capitalism is the disease; socialism is the cure,” while privately using the venue to accumulate personal wealth.

In spite of the angst generated by debates over climate change, there are at least two “facts” on which all people should agree: One, we know that the earth’s climate is in constant flux; it always has been and always will be. Two, it is a given that man has had an impact, principally through greenhouse gasses that are released into the earth’s atmosphere via emissions from the conventional use of fossil fuels. The debate is about the percentage of greenhouse gasses that are in the atmosphere, which are man-caused. Steven Koonin is the director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University and former undersecretary for science in the Energy Department in President Obama’s first term. Writing in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal, he stated, “…human additions to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by the middle of the 21st century are expected to directly shift the atmosphere’s natural greenhouse effect by only 1% to 2%.” The climate is changing, but man is not the main cause.

Yesterday President Obama presented a junk science laundry list to the UN General Assembly.

The President attributed naturally occurring floods, wildfires, hurricanes, drought and sea level rise to climate change, apparently ignorant of the fact that all of the above have been occurring at historically normal, to even below normal rates.

I wonder if President Obama knows that there has been no warming this century?

Dr. Caleb Rossiter, on the other hand, is a liberal Democrat who understands that science is science — no matter what your political persuasion.

Dr. Rossiter granted an exclusive interview to Marc Morano for CFACT’s Climate Hustle film project in which he told Marc:

http://cfact.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=87b74a936c723115dfa298cf3&id=73644e44cf&e=552053f981“My blood simply boils too hot when I read the blather, daily, about climate catastrophe.”
“Obama has long been delusional on this issue.”

“Anyone who believes we are in a climate catastrophe I think is deluding themselves.”

For daring to present his findings about the climate, Professor Rossiter was booted out of a 23 year association with the Institute for Policy Studies. This is the kind of retaliation academics who speak honestly about the climate have come to expect. The global warming campaign is well aware of the chilling effect such actions have on the debate.http://cfact.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=87b74a936c723115dfa298cf3&id=614b450a16&e=552053f981

Marc has extensive excerpts from the interview and background at Climate Depot.

AT had a chance to catch up with Steven Emerson, head of The Investigative Project on Terrorism, and hear his assessment of the ISIS threat here on American soil. Emerson runs the country’s top data center on Islamic terror groups in the United States, working like a man possessed, and accomplishing the work of thousands on sheer guts and determination to protect our country.

Wherever the bad guys have been caught and prosecuted successfully, you will find Emerson working quietly behind the scenes as an invaluable ally of the FBI and Homeland Security. Because he accepts no money from the government, Emerson has been free of the diktats of the Obama administration that have forbidden the FBI to train their sights on Muslim terrorists. (That means The Investigative Project needs your help to continue its work.)

In the words of U.S. Representative Pete Hoekstra, Ranking Member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence:

The Investigative Project on Terrorism is critical to our nation’s security. There is no other non-governmental group that has better intelligence or data on the threat to the United States and our allies. Making do with a bare bones budget, the IPT is a national treasure whose influence and achievements are unparalleled.

It is not an exaggeration to say that because of Democrat political correctness hamstringing our FBI agents, they could not combat the Islamists in our midst without Steven Emerson. Oliver “Buck” Revell, former head of FBI Investigations and Counter-Terrorism, said as much in these words: “The Investigative Project has been one of the most important sources of accurate and timely information on the real goals and objectives of the wide spread and powerful Islamist movement.”

The FBI turns to Emerson to find out what is happening. So does AT. This is what Emerson told us:

Isis is Al Qaeda 3.0. They are already in the United States and the only reason there has not been a terror attack is that they have not decided to do it yet.

Like everyone else I knew in the Forest Hills of my boyhood, my parents were the American–born children of immigrants from Eastern Europe. But my grandparents, who left Russia and Romania in their desperate quest for freedom, opportunity and children who would become genuine Americans, always remained foreigners. They spoke Yiddish, brewed tea in samovars schlepped from Odessa, and shrieked hysterically – doubtlessly reminded of the Czar’s army – when my beloved uncle was drafted during World War II.

Their allegiance to the United States was pledged every four years when, like the overwhelming majority of American Jews of their generation, they voted for Franklin D. Roosevelt. During my childhood I believed that Roosevelt’s first name was “President”; he was the closest thing to a Savior that our brand of Americanized Judaism permitted. We listened to his “fireside chats” and during the 1944 presidential campaign my mother dragged me to Queens Boulevard in pouring rain to cheer his passing motorcade. I vividly remember glimpsing his delightful dog Fala, but not the President. At my father’s suggestion, I even wrote to the White House to ask him to buy a war bond to support our school’s patriotic campaign.

Six months later, the impact of his death registered only with the arrival of Life magazine. It displayed the photograph of a mournful black accordionist, weeping as he played “Going Home” when Roosevelt’s body left Warm Springs for burial in Hyde Park. That image ranked in memory – and still does – with the Jewish boy in Warsaw, my age exactly, raising his arms in terror as he confronted Nazi soldiers; and with the first horrific Life photos of emaciated survivors in the extermination camps.

All those memories were rekindled while I watched “The Roosevelts,” Ken Burns’ new documentary. As a professional historian, mentored by one of the commentators, I had long ago come to realize that FDR hardly was the saint that my parents, extended family, and virtually every American Jew outside privileged German Jewish circles, had worshipped. So I took with many grains of salt, but rising anger, the whitewash of FDR’s indifference to the plight of European Jewry that I was witnessing, even though I knew that disgraceful story all too well.

But not until I read (or reread) some of Roosevelt’s most despicable statements about Jews, extensively documented in a series of on-line commentaries by Rafael Medoff, founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, did the depths of Roosevelt’s loathing for Jews, and refusal to lift a finger (which, unlike his legs, was not paralyzed) to rescue them, fully penetrate. As far back as 1920, when FDR was the Democratic party candidate for vice president, he had proposed that “the greater part of the foreign population of the City of New York” should be “distributed to different localities upstate” so as to feel pressure to “conform to the manners and customs and requirements of their new home.” As a member of the Harvard board of directors he supported a Jewish admissions quota.