Nothing the IDF does surprises me anymore. I’m ashamed my tax dollars are funding this.

“Israeli soldiers again opened fire on Palestinian farmers and international Human Rights Workers (HRWs) on Thursday 5th February, as they attempted to harvest parsley in agricultural land near the Green Line.

Returning to farm-land of Al Faraheen village, in the Abassan Jedida area, east of Khan Younis, where soldiers had opened fire on Tuesday 3rd February, farmers and HRWs were able to harvest the parsley crop for only half an hour, before soldiers again began to shoot. A number of shots were fired into the air, before the soldiers started to aim in the direction of the farmers and international accompaniment. Bullets were heard to whiz past, close to people’s heads.

. . . .

This behavior on the part of the Israeli soldiers was an almost exact repeat of their response to the presence of the farmers and internationals, in the same area of farm-land, two days before. On the Tuesday, however, the group was able to harvest for two hours before soldiers began to shoot. Whilst farmers had hoped to be able to wait-out the shooting, in order to continue harvesting, it quickly became clear that the situation was too dangerous for that to be possible.

The farmers of Al Faraheen are particularly aware of the level of danger they face when entering farm lands that are within 1 km of the Green Line – after watching their friend and colleague, 27 year old Anwar Il Ibrim, from neighboring Benesela, killed by a bullet to the neck while he was picking parsley in the same area, just one week before.

The owner of the land, Yusuf Abu Shaheen, commented after Tuesday’s gun-fire “If you [internationals] hadn’t been with us today, the soldiers would have killed us all”. (Read more from palsolidarity.org)

See Also:
Hampshire College becomes first college in U.S. to divest from Israeli Occupation

Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad they’re opposing the stimulus, but where have they been for the last eight years?

This is inexcusable. Why do the sleaziest ones always seem to have the most powerful positions in government? Wait. Don’t answer that.

“SAO PAULO — General Motors plans to invest $1 billion in Brazil to avoid the kind of problems the U.S. automaker is facing in its home market, said the beleaguered car maker.

According to the president of GM Brazil-Mercosur, Jaime Ardila, the funding will come from the package of financial aid that the manufacturer will receive from the U.S. government and will be used to ‘complete the renovation of the line of products up to 2012.’” (Read more from Daily Paul)

YES WE CAN!!!

I’m delighted this effort is still alive.

It’s like the great Frederic Bastiat (1801 – 1850) wrote in his legendary essay “The Law.”

The law is perverted! The law – and, in its wake, all the collective forces of the nation – the law, I say, not only diverted from its proper direction, but made to pursue one entirely contrary! The law become the tool of every kind of avarice, instead of being its check! The law guilty of that very iniquity which it was its mission to punish!

In the wake of the injustice described by Bastiat, the people revolted. They assembled guillotines.

Paul Bedard of USNew’s Washington Whispers reported:

“We’re receiving E-mails from Capitol Hill staffers expressing frustration that they can’t get a copy of the stimulus bill agreed to last night at a price of $789 billion. What’s more, staffers are complaining about who does have a copy: K Street lobbyists. E-mails one key Democratic staffer: “K Street has the bill, or chunks of it, already, and the congressional offices don’t. So, the Hill is getting calls from the press (because it’s leaking out) asking us to confirm or talk about what we know—but we can’t do that because we haven’t seen the bill. Anyway, peeps up here are sort of a combo of confused and like, ‘Is this really happening?’” Reporters pressing for details, meanwhile, are getting different numbers from different offices, especially when seeking the details of specific programs.” (Read more from usnews.com)

See Also, Ron Paul Discusses Stimulus on CNN American Morning 02/16/2009:

This video covers it all. Please watch.

Marc Faber:

“Let the banks go bankrupt . . . but guarantee the bank’s depositors.”

“The economic crisis and the financial crisis is a direct consequence of continuous U.S. government intervention into the economy through fiscal and monetary policies that have been designed to never have a recession.”

“With the stimulus package the government is proposing, especially the spending package, I think the depression will last longer, and the government, that is largely unproductive, will continue to grow at the expense of the private sector and crowd out the private sector.”

“There has always been an extremely close and cozy relationship between the regulators and between the government agencies, and government related enterprises like Freddie Mac and Fannie May, and Wall Street.”

“There is no free lunch. Someone has to pay. The problem arose because we have too much debt, not because we have too little debt. . . . that additional debt will not be spent very productively, because it’s spent by the government and not the private sector.”

The price of gold will be higher than the price of the Dow Industrials.

“The way I see economic policies in the world, and in particular, in the U.S. is print money, if it doesn’t work, print more.”

“It is not a failure of the free market that brought about the crisis, it is continuous intervention by the government.”

“More than eight in ten cities are in financial trouble, up from 64% six months ago, according to a survey released Wednesday.” (Read more from money.cnn.com)

by Melissa Rossi Author, What Every American Should Know about the Middle East (Plume/Penguin, Jan. 2009)

“I’d thought it would just be a breezy Friday afternoon, when I clicked on today’s post of M.J. Rosenberg, here on Huffington Post.
Director of Policy for the Israel Policy Forum, Mr. Rosenberg’s blog entry concerns the upcoming Israeli election — and he tells us the outcome is ‘really not our business.’ After all, he blithely notes, ‘As Americans, our job is to promote policies that are best for America, and for Israel.’

(NOTE on Sunday, Feb 8: The above quote is from his original column on Huffington Post, which he changed over the weekend — deleting the controversial ‘and for Israel’ part. The column, however, can still be read on the Israel Policy Forum at http://www.israelpolicyforum.org/ — as of Sunday at least.)

There weren’t comments when I started reading — but by the time I read through his post and hit the reply button, there were already five comments and more pending. All of them saying the same thing — no, Mr. Rosenberg — our job is to promote policies that are best for America. PERIOD.” (Read more from huffintonpost.com)

“The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today slammed the human rights group Amnesty International for its report on the Israeli-Hezbollah war, calling it ‘bigoted, biased, and borderline anti-Semitic.’ – Anti-Defamation League” (from freemarketnews.com)

“In the ‘Rejectionism and Accommodation’ chapter of Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel & The Palestinians, Noam Chomsky recounts how Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s 1971 peace initiative has been effaced from history. Sadat’s offer of ‘a full peace treaty on the pre-June 1967 borders, with security guarantees, recognized borders and so on’ was rejected by Israel with the backing of the U.S. Henry Kissinger ‘assumed that Israel’s power was unchallengeable’ and thus ignored Sadat’s warnings that ‘he would be forced to resort to war if his efforts at a peaceful settlement were rebuffed.’” (Read more from antiwar.com)

Scary. Esperanto enthusiasm has died down in recent decades, but who knows what may yet arise from the good-idea factory in Washington DC. Maybe some day, we’ll all be required by law to speak it. The central planners even had a movie made in Esperanto:

“The fiscal stimulus bill being debated in Congress not only won’t help the economy, it will make the recession much worse, says Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital.

Schiff scoffs at the notion the economic decline is starting to level off and concedes no government action means a ‘terrible’ recession. But the path of increased government intervention will lead to ‘unmitigated disaster,’ says Schiff, who gained notoriety in 2007-08 for his prescient calls on the housing bubble and U.S. stocks.

The problem, he says, is the government is trying to perpetuate a ‘phony economy’ based on borrowing and spending. With the U.S. consumer tapped out, the government is ‘now taking on the mantle’ of consumer of last resort, he continues, predicting the bond bubble will soon burst – if it hasn’t already – ultimately leading to a collapse of the dollar and an ‘inflationary depression worse than anything any of us have ever seen.’” (Read more from westernstandard.blogs.com)

Watch the video in this earlier post to learn about Peter Schiff, and to see the ridicule he dealt with for speaking the truth.

from ft.com

See Also: