I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic
The above oath is taken by our military, elected officials and even immigrants becoming US citizens. At what point are our leaders domestic enemies? The president is gutting our military while Iran, North Korea, Syria, the Muslim Brotherhood and Russia are gearing up for a world war. North Korea’s active and reserve military is 1.9 million soldiers. Our active military is 1,477,896 and reserve military is 1,458,500 . Subtract 500,000 from the US numbers, throw in Iran’s 1.2 active and reserve military to get a picture of what domestic enemies can do to national security.
The following excerpts give a partial picture of how our government is destroying the country from the inside.
David DeGerolamo
Iran plans more war games in strait as sanctions bite
Iran announced plans on Friday for new military exercises in the world’s most important oil shipping lane, the latest in weeks of bellicose gestures towards the West as new sanctions threaten Tehran’s oil exports.
Real Admiral Ali Fadavi, naval commander of the Revolutionary Guards Corps, said exercises next month would focus directly on the Strait of Hormuz, which leads out of the Gulf and provides the outlet for most Mid-East oil.
New Pentagon strategy stresses Asia, cyber, drones
Administration officials have said they expect Army and Marine Corp personnel levels to be reduced by 10 percent to 15 percent over the next decade as part of the reductions.
The Army’s current strength is about 565,000 soldiers and there are 201,000 Marines, meaning an eventual loss of between 76,000 and 114,000 troops.
Mark Levin: ‘We Have a Constitutional Crisis’
On his radio show last night, Mark Levin said that President Barack Obama has caused a “constitutional crisis” by appointing members to the National Labor Relations Board and a director to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau without going through the constitutionally required Senate confirmation process.
“We have a constitutional crisis,” Levin said. “It is in fact a constitutional crisis.”
“The President of the United States is trashing the Constitution now day in and day out,” Levin said.
At one point, Levin likened the explanation Obama made yesterday for appointing these federal officials without Senate confrmation to the “forthright statement of a dictator.”
Real Jobless Rate Is 11.4% With Realistic Labor Force Participation Rate
One does not need to be a rocket scientist to grasp the fudging the BLS has been doing every month for years now in order to bring the unemployment rate lower: the BLS constantly lowers the labor force participation rate as more and more people “drop out” of the labor force for one reason or another. While there is some floating speculation that this is due to early retirement, this is completely counterfactual when one also considers the overall rise in the general civilian non institutional population. In order to back out this fudge we are redoing an analysis we did first back in August 2010, which shows what the real unemployment rate would be using a realistic labor force participation rate. To get that we used the average rate since 1980, or ever since the great moderation began. As it happens, this long-term average is 65.8% (chart 1). We then apply this participation rate to the civilian noninstitutional population to get what an “implied” labor force number is, and additionally calculate the implied unemployed using this more realistic labor force. We then show the difference between the reported and implied unemployed (chart 2). Finally, we calculate the jobless rate using this new implied data. It won’t surprise anyone that as of December, the real implied unemployment rate was 11.4% -basically where it has been ever since 2009, and at 2.9% delta to reported, represents the widest divergence to reported data since the early 1980s.
How Could You Sign This Police-State NDAA Bill?
No indictment. No judge or jury. No evidence. No trial. Just an indefinite jail sentence.
In other words:
If someone in the government suspects that you’re somehow associated with terrorism, you can be jailed indefinitely in a military prison.
Defenders of this language — including Senators John McCain (R) and Carl Lavin (D), who sponsored it — position it as being tough on terrorism.
And that’s fine: Everyone wants to be tough on terrorism.
There are ways of being tough on terrorism that preserve basic rights. Unfortunately, this isn’t one of them.
If the government and military never made mistakes–if they never suspected people of being associated with terrorism who aren’t actually associated with terrorism–then this language wouldn’t be so scary.
