httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6T5VdLQnnVI
Trifecta continues its investigation into new normals by looking at American politics. Is the weaponization of the IRS a new political trend? Will politicians continue to use the federal government to intimidate the press and its perceived enemies?
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7wZt1TCSAw
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3z5Z2maN3Ig
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Who will stop a French style revolution in our country? Do we want restoration of the rule of law or retribution? In a moral and religious nation, we would not have to ask these questions. The very people who destroyed our nation’s foundation in order to destroy it from within have removed their own safeguards when the nation collapses. This is a sad commentary on our leaders: their arrogance has blinded them from the consequences of their actions. The clock is ticking. I do not see any revival of our faith or public virtue to enable another righteous revolution over tyranny.
David DeGerolamo
by T.L. Davis
As Americans we have wanted the system to work. When the government and the bankers wrecked the economy and looted trillions of dollars in private IRAs, 401ks, home equity and business equity, we waited for the economy to stabilize to where those funds would return. Instead, the government took trillions more in debt to pay off the bankers and government agencies that wrecked the economy in the first place.
When they passed Obamacare through back-door deals and open government bribes in the form of the Cornhusker Kickback and other sweetheart deals to key senators and House members, we waited for the Supreme Court to rule this monstrosity unconstitutional, as logic would dictate that it was.
When the Justice Department was caught red-handed walking guns across the border and into the hands of Mexican drug cartels (ultimately to kill one of our own law-enforcement officers), we waited for the resignation of the Attorney General, as well we should expect.
When Benghazi revealed that the Secretary of State had denied protection to the American Embassy prior to the attack, we waited for the resignation of the Secretary of State, as well we should expect.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGiX5tbLKiY#t=1s
h/t Roger K
Downtown Raleigh
Today should be a wake up call for people in North Carolina. Our state government’s solution to an impending snow and ice storm was to brine the roads. Unfortunately, the brine only melted the snow which quickly turned to ice covered by snow. Within one hour, I-40 in Raleigh was covered by snow. And not one snowplow was seen even though traffic was moving about 20 mph at that time. My normal 15 minute commute took 2-1/4 hours. Once the exit ramps closed due to accidents and abandoned cars, the main arteries were doomed.
Observations:
1. No one could have foreseen the rapid accumulation of snow in a two hour period. But snow plows should have been out on I-40 and US 1.
2. The police had no communication with the DOT. I was within 1 mile of my house when abandoned cars and accidents blocked the bridge ahead. I turned around to backtrack and saw a sheriff’s car sitting in the same lane from which I had just turned. I stopped and asked him if the bridge ahead would be cleared. He did not know that the bridge was closed due to accidents and abandoned cars. I assume that he turned around at some point.
3. My local talk radio station continued to play Rush Limbaugh instead of issuing traffic reports. I did not hear one traffic report during my “commute” home.
4. As in the ice storm ten years ago, cell phone communication was quickly overloaded. I could not communicate or coordinate with my family.
5. Once I got home, my son told me that his car was parked at a gas station 5 miles away and his family car was abandoned halfway up a hill about 2 miles away. Someone had given him and his family a ride to our house. We went out to get his car with my four wheel drive. This is when I realized that this was just a preview of our future.
a. The Good: people were out helping cars up hills and pulling them out of ditches.
b. The Bad: I was actually warned by a women driving in another direction to not continue down Penny Road in Raleigh. Her warning was not about road conditions but the people. When were you ever warned to stay away from people for you own safety?
In our subdivision, traffic was stopped by two trucks going in opposite directions for over five minutes as the drivers had a conversation. A man in back of me walked up to them to have one move to allow traffic to continue and they did not listen. I walked up and asked what the problem was. Which brought about an angry response by the one driver (both were outside standing in between their cars). I asked again what the problem was and want kind of help did they need. At that point, the other man got into his truck and left. As the line of cars passed the still stopped truck, I stopped and told him to follow me to my house and I would help him.
His problem was that he lived about five miles away and did not know how to get home. He had no maps and did not know any alternate routes to his house. I gave him directions as his wife, baby and dog stayed in the car. But the truly scary part was the expression on his face. Once he realized that he had no idea how to get home (solve a problem), his mind stopped working. I had to repeat simple directions in order for him to comprehend them. And I do mean simple directions.
What will happen when this man has no food and his family is starving?
David DeGerolamo
Snow is paralyzing North Carolina as the state runs into some of the same traffic problems that plagued Atlanta a few weeks ago.
Some roads in Raleigh, Charlotte, Fayetteville, and Durham are clogged with traffic. People who are on the roads are getting stuck, and there’s a long wait for tow trucks in some areas.
Brad Panovich, a meteorologist in Charlotte, notes that, just like in Atlanta last month, the bad traffic in North Carolina is being caused in part by everyone hitting the roads at the same time.
People went to work early Wednesday morning, but all left at the same time once the snow started falling between 9 and 11 a.m., causing gridlock on the snow-coated roads. Plows are having difficulty treating the roads because of the traffic.
Some people have already resorted to abandoning their cars:
by Michael Snyder
If an ice storm can cause this much panic in our major cities, what will a real crisis look like? The biggest news story in the United States right now is the “historic ice storm” that is hammering the South. Travel will be a nightmare, schools and businesses will be closed, and hundreds of thousands of people will lose power. In fact, it is being projected that some people could be without power for up to a week. But at the end of the day, the truth is that this ice storm is just an inconvenience. Yes, the lives of millions of Americans will be disrupted for a few days, but soon the ice will melt and life will be back to normal. Unfortunately, it doesn’t take much for people to start behaving like crazed lunatics. As you will see below, the winter weather is causing average Americans to ransack grocery stores, fight over food items and even pull guns on one another. If this is how people will behave during a temporary weather emergency, how will they behave when we are facing a real disaster?
This is a perfect example that shows why it is wise to always have emergency food supplies on hand. According to CNN, all that is left on the shelves of some grocery stores in Atlanta is “corn and asparagus”…
As the skies turned heavy, Atlantans cleaned stores out of loaves of bread, gallons of milk, bundles of firewood and cans of beans and beer. In some stores, all that was left were the apparently less-popular corn and asparagus.
See additional comments on Tea Party Nation.
Congress approved the elimination of the debt ceiling today and the pResident is expected to sign it quickly into law. The Republican “leadership” in both the House (John Boehner) and the Senate (Mitch McConnell) supported this measure to abandon their fiduciary responsibility to spend our money without any oversight or restraint.
If our elected officials are not representing their constituents, the Constitution or the rule of law, how can any believe that we are a representative Republic? And once we accept the reality, what is our course of action? The government has already labelled Constitutionalists, Christians and veterans as domestic terrorists. The IRS has targeted selected individuals and Tea Party groups without any repercussions. The NSA has implemented an illegal surveillance system that is the envy of every repressive regime in the world.
We must understand what we are facing: tyranny. Backed by armed federal agencies (IRS and USPS employees are not the only armed federal employees) and a militarized police force (courtesy of the federal government), our only advantage is numbers. Or is it? A majority of the people now work for the government or are supported by welfare/disability/social security. Who will fight to regain Liberty? Who will even fight the two political parties who have sold our children into slavery?
David DeGerolamo
As most Americans go about their daily lives without care or concern for what’s happening around them, 92 million miles away a catastrophic threat may well be in the making.
In January, the NOAA identified a sizable sun spot dubbed AR 1944. Within hours of warnings being issued about the potential for this particular region of the sun to cause earth-directed coronal mass ejections it sent an X-class solar flare our way. While powerful, that particular flare and the subsequent M-class flares were not strong enough to cause any significant disruptions on earth.
But as the spot rotated to the other side of the sun things got interesting… and ever more dangerous for the people of earth.
AR1944 has since been renamed to AR1967, and the region is now more active than it was in January. According to sky photographer John Chumack, AR1967 has grown considerably. It is now wider than Jupiter. That’s big. So big, in fact, that you can fit over 100 earth-sized planets into it.
h/t Matt Bracken
Ordinarily we would ignore the news of another banker’s death – after all these sad events happen all the time – if it wasn’t for several contextual aspects of this most recent passage. First, the death in question, as reported by the Stamford Daily Voice is that of Ryan Henry Crane, a Harvard graduate, who is survived by his wife, son and parents at the very young age of 37. Second, Ryan Henry Crane was formerly employed by JPMorgan – a bank which was featured prominently in the news as recently as two weeks ago when another of its London-based employees committed suicide by jumping from the top floor of its Canary Wharf building. Third: Crane was an Executive Director in JPM’s Global Program Trading desk, founded in 1999 by an ex-DE Shaw‘er, a function of the firm which is instrumental to preserving JPM’s impeccable and (so far in 2013) flawless trading record of zero trading losses.
There was little detail surrounding the death:
Ryan Henry Crane of Stamford died Monday, Feb. 3. He was 37.
(With apologies to Richard Strauss – Die Fledermaus)
RINO’s watch VOLLMOND-FLEDERMAUS (The Dance of The Full-Moon Bat):
While they relax into “election mode”:
This unusually cautious approach comes nine months before Election Day and illustrates how both parties are reluctant to tackle anything that doesn’t poll well. With the battle for control of the Senate projected to be extremely close, neither side wants to drift into a sudden political storm.
Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), who is likely to hold his majority in the House, made clear Tuesday he does not want to squander his political capital in another vicious fiscal fight. Link
Boehner’s political capital ?
Really ? … REALLY ??
Must be fiat rather than specie …
Boehner – backed by the full faith and credit of ____(who)____?
House Speaker John Boehner’s office said today that he is examining options on how to respond to what the speaker yesterday characterized as President Barack Obama’s “rewriting” of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act “on a whim.”
“We are examining all of our options,” Boehner’s spokesman Michael Steel told CNSNews.com on Tuesday.
On Monday, the Treasury Department announced a new regulation that frees employers with between 50 and 99 employees from complying until 2016 with the Affordable Care Act mandate that requires all employees with at least 50 full-time workers to buy them health insurance.
Under the law, such employers were required to comply with the insurance mandate by Jan. 1, 2014–or pay a fine to the federal government.
This large front is behind the rain, freezing rain, sleet and snow being dumped on the region, according to NASA. But the worst of the weather is yet to come.
