LilSugar

HIV and AIDS - Get Important Information!

Samson Adhikari — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 17:28:51 -0800

HIV and AIDS - Get Important Information!

Samson Adhikari — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 17:28:59 -0800

Blackwater Took Hundreds of Guns From U.S. Military, Afghan Police

liliblu — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 05:20:54 -0800

Senate Inquiry Shows Contractor Signed for Rifles Using 'South Park' Alias
By Spencer Ackerman 2/23/10 9:00 PM
Employees of the CIA-connected private security corporation Blackwater diverted hundreds of weapons, including more than 500 AK-47 assault rifles, from a U.S. weapons bunker in Afghanistan intended to equip Afghan policemen, according to an investigation by the Senate Armed Services Committee. On at least one occasion, an individual claiming to work for the company evidently signed for a weapons shipment using the name of a “South Park” cartoon character. And Blackwater has yet to return hundreds of the guns to the military.
A Blackwater subsidiary known as Paravant that until recently operated in Afghanistan acquired the weapons for its employees’ “personal use,” according to committee staffers, as did other non-Paravant employees of Blackwater. Yet contractors in Afghanistan are not permitted to operate weapons without explicit permission from U.S. Central Command, something Blackwater never obtained. A November 2008 email from a Paravant vice president named Brian McCracken, obtained by the committee, nevertheless reads: “We have not received formal permission from the Army to carry weapons yet but I will take my chances.”
As a result of Blackwater’s disregard for U.S. military restrictions on contractor firearms, four employees of Paravant - which held a subcontract from defense giant Raytheon to train Afghan soldiers - under the influence of alcohol opened fire on a car carrying four Afghan civilians on May 5, 2009, wounding two. That incident, occurring less than two years after Blackwater guards killed 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, prompted the committee’s investigation.

“In the fight against the Taliban, the perception that the Afghans have of us is critical,” Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the chairman of the committee, told reporters Tuesday afternoon. “It’s clear to me that if we’re going to win that struggle, we need to know that contractor personnel are adequately screened, they’re adequately supervised and they’re adequately held accountable.” Levin will hold a hearing on Blackwater’s Afghanistan contracts Wednesday morning.
The committee’s investigation points to the contrary. Blackwater personnel appear to have gone to exceptional lengths to obtain weapons from U.S. military weapons storehouses intended for use by the Afghan police. According to the committee, at the behest of the company’s Afghanistan country manager, Ricky Chambers, Blackwater on at least two occasions acquired hundreds of rifles and pistols from a U.S. military facility near Kabul called 22 Bunkers by the military and Pol-e Charki by the Afghans. Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of all U.S. military forces in the Middle East and South Asia, wrote to the committee to explain that “there is no current or past written policy, order, directive, or instruction that allows U.S. Military contractors or subcontractors in Afghanistan to use weapons stored at 22 Bunkers.”
On one of those occasions, in September 2008, Chief Warrant Officer Greg Sailer, who worked at 22 Bunkers and is a friend of a Blackwater officer working in Afghanistan, signed over more than 200 AK-47s to an individual identified as “Eric Cartman” or possibly “Carjman” from Blackwater’s Counter Narcotics Training Unit. A Blackwater lawyer told committee staff that no one by those names has ever been employed by the company. Eric Cartman is the name of an obnoxious character from Comedy Central’s popular “South Park” cartoon.
Blackwater personnel invoked their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination when approached by the committee to explain the weapons acquisitions from 22 Bunkers, according to committee staff. Sailer, who is still deployed to Afghanistan, told the committee that he thought Blackwater was signing for the weapons to train Afghan police, a task it has never conducted.
Not all of the guns received from Blackwater have been returned to the Afghan government - and, according to committee staff, many only began to be returned after staff approached the company for an explanation. “It was represented to us that all the weapons had been returned” to 22 Bunkers, Levin said. “That is not true. Hundreds of them were not returned.” Asked if that meant Blackwater lied to Congress, Levin replied, “They misrepresented the facts, and I’d like to leave it at that.”
Raytheon did not renew Paravant’s contract for training the Afghan army, which expired in September. Blackwater still holds a contract with the State Department worth millions of dollars to protect diplomats in Afghanistan. While that contract expires this year, Politico reported on Tuesday that Blackwater, now renamed Xe Services, might acquire a new multimillion-dollar contract from the Defense Department to train Afghan police - the same police force that Blackwater’s weapons diversions from 22 Bunkers deprived of hundreds of pistols and rifles.
This is not the first time Blackwater has faced allegations of diverted weapons. In 2007, company employees came under federal investigation for improperly shipping hundreds of weapons to Iraq, some of which are believed to have been sold on the black market and acquired by a Kurdish terrorist group. A Blackwater statement at the time said allegations that the company was “in any way associated or complicit in unlawful arms activities are baseless.” The New York Times reported in November that the company is negotiating with regulators over “hundreds of millions of dollars in fines” associated with the illicit weapons shipments.
In January, Blackwater’s founder, Erik Prince, confirmed to Vanity Fair that his 12-year-old company - which has earned more than a billion dollars through government contracts in the past decade - was involved in a nascent terrorist assassination program run by the CIA, among other CIA activities. “I’m paying for all sorts of intelligence activities to support American national security, out of my own pocket,” Prince told the magazine. Additionally, The Nation recently reported that Blackwater assists the Joint Special Operations Command with the terrorist manhunt in Afghanistan and Pakistan, including with the operations of JSOC’s armed unmanned drones.
Levin said his inquiry had uncovered “inadequate oversight by the Army over this contract.” The Florida-based Army office supposedly overseeing the contract did not even have a contracting officer representative in Afghanistan when the Paravant employees shot at Afghan civilians on May 5, 2009. Yet as early as December 2008, concerned Raytheon personnel informed that Army office that Paravant personnel were carrying unapproved weapons. An officer in Afghanistan responsible for training Afghan soldiers told the committee, “We should have had better control.”
Additionally, Blackwater personnel in Afghanistan, including those involved in both the May shooting and an earlier improper weapons discharge from December 2008, have been cited for, among other infractions, drug and alcohol abuse and, in one case, an “extensive criminal history.”
Wednesday’s hearing is expected to receive testimony from current and former Blackwater/Paravant officers, including Brian C. McCracken, the former Paravant vice president who now serves as Raytheon’s chief Afghanistan program officer; Fred Roitz, a Blackwater vice president; and John Walker, a former Paravant program officer.
http://washingtonindependent.com/77476/blackwater-the-senate-and-south-park

Penelope Cruz - “Vogue” December 2007

justingirl1989 — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 12:36:23 -0800

Penelope Cruz takes the December 2007 cover of Vogue, giving us a peek into her life at home in Madrid. Here are some interview snippets:

On what she looks forward to everyday: “I’ve always looked for my sanity, my sofa time, my long dinners.”

On director Pedro Almodovar: “I became completely obsessed with Pedro. Then he called me when I made my first movie, Jamon Jamon. I remember that day like it was yesterday. I was drying my hair in the bathroom, and somebody said, ‘Almodovar is calling.’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing–I’d dreamed about that moment for so long… Now, he’s like family to me.”

On why she won’t comment on being single or not: “That’s the same as saying, This is a subject I’m prepared to talk about. And I’m not.” (She’s currently seeing Spanish actor Javier Bardem.)

On how you shouldn’t live your life: “You cannot live your life looking at yourself from someone else’s point of view.”

On her supposed love affair with Bono: “Like when I went on holiday to Bono’s house with his wife and kids… we were holding hands because we’re very good friends, and do you know what the paparazzi did to us? They took photos and cropped out Bono’s wife and children! So they made up a story about us being together, knowing perfectly well that I was there with the whole family.”

source: justjared.com

Joshua Tabor, Who Served in Iraq, Accused of Waterboarding Daughter

bluesarahlou — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 11:36:28 -0800

An Army sergeant who served in Iraq for 15 months has been restricted to his Washington military base after being accused of waterboarding his 4-year-old daughter because she refused to recite her ABCs.

Joshua Ryan Tabor, 27, was arrested on Jan. 31 and charged with assaulting a child after police in Yelm, Wash., responded to a call of a disturbance at Tabor's home and then later found the little girl hiding in a locked bathroom, according to Police Chief Todd Stancil.

"We had a report of [Tabor] walking around his neighborhood holding a Kevlar helmet and threatening to bust out windows," Stancil told ABCNews.com today. "In the process of talking to Tabor's girlfriend about what was going on, we learned that he had also been abusing his daughter."

Stancil said that when the cops coaxed the little girl out of the bathroom they saw that she was covered in "multiple bruises pretty much all over her body."

"She was very open with us," Stancil said of the young girl, whose name is not being released because she is a minor. "She basically came right out and said, 'Daddy does this to me. He uses his hands.'"

Both the girl and the father admitted to the torture, even detailing how Tabor would sit the girl on the edge of the bathroom sink and hold her head down until it was nearly submerged in water, dunking her if she refused to recite the alphabet, said Stancil.

Tabor's girlfriend, who is not identified in the police reports, could also be charged in the crime, said Stancil. Several portions of the police report are redacted and may implicate the girlfriend in the assault.

In the police report, the girl told authorities that "Daddy was upset becuase she wouldn't say her letters" and that he then put her in the water.

"It was hot! The water was hot!" the girl told police, according to the incident report. "I told him I would say my letters then! My heart shirt got wet."

Tabor told authorities that "his purpose was to punish her by putting her in the water because he knows she is afraid of it and he wanted her to cooperate."

"She said her letters after that," Tabor told the cops, admitting that he had grown frustrated with the girl after practicing the letters for "approximately three hours."

The torture technique of waterboarding, which has been used by the CIA during interrogations of al Qaeda suspects, was outlawed in 2009 by President Obama.

Stancil said he is not sure whether Tabor actually ran the water over the girl's face, a move that would force a gag reflex. His girlfriend reported having "heard the water running" and said that Tabor had an "anger management problem," Stancil said.

"Tabor told investigators that he feels his daughter is 'behind mentally for where she should be for her age,'" said Stancil. "He's blaming the bruises on her squirming and trying to get away from him on the porcelain counter that surrounds the sink."

Stancil said that the young girl was "very articulate" and did not appear to have any developmental issues.

Tabor, who was released Monday from the Thurston County Jail in Olympia on $10,000 bail, did not answer the phone at his Yelm home. An attorney for Tabor was not immediately known.

His arraignment is scheduled for Tuesday, Feb. 16 in Thurston County Superior Court, according to the Nisqually Valley News.

The girl lived with Tabor, his girlfriend and several other children who belonged to the girlfriend. Included in the house was a 2-month-old baby boy Tabor had with his girlfriend.

Tabor's daughter had only been living with him for just two months, according to Stancil. A court ruled late last year that Tabor would split custody of his daughter with the girl's mother in five month increments. Tabor was to care for the girl for the first half of 2010, said Stancil.

The girl's grandparents, who had been caring for the girl prior to the court's decision in their home in Montana, have since come to Yelm and have taken custody of the girl.

According to a Joseph Piek, a spokesman for the Lewis-McChord base where Tabor is assigned, Tabor is a helicopter repairer.

Tabor was assigned to Joint Base Lewis-McChord in December 2006 and was deployed with his unit to Iraq for 15 months from May 2007 to August 2008.

Since posting bail, Tabor has been restricted to the base and is living in his unit's barracks, according to Piek.

Source

Forces Driving Obama on Don't Ask, Don't Tell

stephley — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 12:24:18 -0800

President Obama and top Pentagon officials met repeatedly over the past year about repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the law that bans openly gay members of the military.

But it was in Oval Office strategy sessions to review court cases challenging the ban - ones that could reach the Supreme Court - that Mr. Obama faced the fact that if he did not change the policy, his administration would be forced to defend publicly the constitutionality of a law he had long opposed.

As a participant recounted one of the sessions, Mr. Obama told Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, that the law was “just wrong.” Mr. Obama told them, the participant said, that he had delayed acting on repeal because the military was stretched in two wars and he did not want another polarizing debate in 2009 to distract from his health care fight. But in 2010, he told them, this would be a priority. He got no objections.

On Tuesday, in the first Congressional hearing on the issue in 17 years, Mr. Gates and Admiral Mullen will unveil the Pentagon’s initial plans for carrying out a repeal, which requires an act of Congress. Gay rights leaders say they expect Mr. Gates to announce in the interim that the Defense Department will not take action to discharge service members whose sexual orientation is revealed by third parties or jilted partners, one of the most onerous aspects of the law. Pentagon officials had no comment.

Gay rights groups are calling the hearing historic even as they question how quickly the administration is prepared to act.

But Republicans are already signaling that they are not eager to take up the issue. “In the middle of two wars and in the middle of this giant security threat,” Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the Republican leader, said Sunday on “Meet the Press” on NBC, “why would we want to get into this debate?”

Still, it is undeniable that a variety of 21st-century forces - a new generation in the military, a change in climate at the top levels of the Pentagon, pressure on the president from a critical interest group, even Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand’s anticipated Democratic primary battle in New York - converged to begin repeal of a 1993 law that has led to the discharge of more than 13,000 gay men and lesbians, including desperately needed Arabic translators.

As Mr. Gates told Mr. Obama last year, it was no longer a question of if the ban would be repealed, but when, said the meeting participant, who declined to be named to discuss internal White House deliberations.

In the 2008 presidential campaign, Mr. Obama regularly pledged to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell,” but in his first year in office he refused to set a timetable and said so little publicly about the issue that gay rights leaders, an important constituency, grew increasingly angry.

Pentagon officials, who were busy withdrawing forces from Iraq and escalating the war in Afghanistan, were pleased that the president was stalling. In April, Mr. Gates told reporters that he and the president wanted to push the issue “down the road a bit.”

In New York, Ms. Gillibrand, a former House member from a conservative upstate district who had just been appointed to the Senate seat vacated by Hillary Rodham Clinton, was moving to the left on several issues in anticipation of a primary this year.

In June she met with Lt. Dan Choi, a West Point graduate and an Arabic linguist and infantry officer in Iraq in 2006 and 2007. Lieutenant Choi is facing a discharge for announcing to Rachel Maddow on MSNBC in March that he was gay.

“This policy asked him to lie every day, and it was antithetical to everything he had learned in the military,” Ms. Gillibrand said in an interview. In July she tried and failed to introduce a bill for an 18-month moratorium on discharges and instead said she asked Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who leads the Armed Services Committee, to hold a hearing on the issue.

Since then, Ms. Gillibrand has frequently told reporters that Harold E. Ford Jr., a former five-term Democratic congressman from Tennessee who is weighing a run for her seat, voted twice in favor of legislation to make same-sex marriage illegal. (Mr. Ford says he has changed his mind.)

Despite Ms. Gillibrand’s efforts, little happened on the issue over the summer, although Mr. Gates asked his legal counsel to determine if the Pentagon could avoid a discharge if a service member’s sexual orientation was revealed by someone else. “If somebody is outed by a third party, does that force us to take action?” he asked in late June.

By September, when any hearings would have been subsumed by the intense deliberations at the White House and Pentagon about escalating the war in Afghanistan, there was a small but telling sign of change: an article in Admiral Mullen’s military journal, Joint Force Quarterly, called “don’t ask, don’t tell” a failure and said no evidence supported the claim that allowing openly gay men and lesbians to serve would undercut unit cohesion.

In December, after the Afghanistan debate was over and Mr. Obama had announced the deployment of 30,000 more troops, Admiral Mullen convened a small group to prepare for what would finally be Mr. Levin’s hearings. There was hardly unanimity.

Although Pentagon officials were of the view that the younger rank and file did not care much about serving with openly gay service members, Gen. James T. Conway, the commandant of the Marine Corps, had major reservations. But as a practical matter, the military would follow the orders of the commander in chief.

Polls now show that a majority of Americans support openly gay service - a majority did not in 1993 - but there have been no recent broad surveys of the 1.4 million active-duty personnel.

A 2008 census by The Military Times of predominantly Republican and largely older subscribers found that 58 percent opposed to efforts to repeal the policy; in 2006, a poll by Zogby International of 545 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans found that three-quarters were comfortable around gay service members.

At the White House, Mr. Obama decided at a meeting shortly before Christmas to use his State of the Union address to reaffirm his support for repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell.” A White House official said that Mr. Obama’s call for repeal stayed through six drafts of the speech, despite reports of internal battles over how far he should go.

As Tuesday’s hearing approaches, no one is predicting that the issue will be easy.

Aaron Belkin, the director of the Palm Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, a research group that focuses on repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell,” said he expected Mr. Gates to announce on Tuesday that the Pentagon would end discharges based on third-party accusations, but also that it would move slowly, which Mr. Belkin opposes.
“By signaling that integration is a complicated, fragile process and slow-rolling it over a number of years, you give obstructionists in the military the chance to stir up trouble in their units,” he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/01/us/politics/01military.html?hpw

MooreCo Recalls Ergonomic Office Chairs Due to Fall Hazard

tdsollog — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 16:41:58 -0800

MooreCo Recalls Ergonomic Office Chairs Due to Fall HazardNEWS from CPSCU.S. Consumer Product Safety CommissionOffice of Information and Public Affairs Washington, DC 20207 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEJanuary 19, 2010Release # 10-110 Firm's Recall Hotline: (888) 446-5161CPSC Recall Hotline: (800) 638-2772CPSC Media Contact: (301) 504-7908 MooreCo Recalls Ergonomic Office Chairs Due to Fall HazardWASHINGTON, D.C. - The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, in cooperation with the firm named below, today announced a voluntary recall of the following products. Consumers should stop using recalled products immediately unless otherwise instructed.Name of Product: Spine Align and Posture Perfect Ergonomic Office ChairsUnits: About 700Manufacturer: MooreCo Inc., dba Balt & Best-Rite Manufacturing, of Temple, Texas.Hazard: The legs of the chair can break, posing fall hazard to the user.Incidents/Injuries: The company has received five reports of the legs of the chairs breaking, resulting in three minor injuries and in the aggravation of an existing back injury.Description: This recall involves the Spine Align and the Posture Perfect Ergonomic Office Chairs with model numbers 34571 and 34556 respectively. The base of the chair is made of hard plastic and the chair has no marks or labels. Chairs bearing marks or labels are not included in this recall. The model number is found in the packaging.Sold through: Catalogs and online by United Stationers, Staples, S.P. Richards, and W.B. Mason from December 2007 through October 2009 for between $320 and $650. Manufactured in: South KoreaRemedy: Consumers should stop using the recalled chairs immediately and contact MooreCo for a free repair or a replacement chair.Consumer Contact: For additional information, contact MooreCo toll free at (888) 446-5161 between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, or visit the company's Web site at www.chairrecall.comTo see this recall on CPSC's web site, including pictures of the recalled product, please go to: http://www.cpsc.gov/cpscpub/prerel/prhtml10/10110.html

They Still Don’t Get It

Tulipe — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 04:45:02 -0800

January 23, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
By BOB HERBERT

How loud do the alarms have to get? There is an economic emergency in the country with millions upon millions of Americans riddled with fear and anxiety as they struggle with long-term joblessness, home foreclosures, personal bankruptcies and dwindling opportunities for themselves and their children.

The door is being slammed on the American dream and the politicians, including the president and his Democratic allies on Capitol Hill, seem not just helpless to deal with the crisis, but completely out of touch with the hardships that have fallen on so many.

While the nation was suffering through the worst economy since the Depression, the Democrats wasted a year squabbling like unruly toddlers over health insurance legislation. No one in his or her right mind could have believed that a workable, efficient, cost-effective system could come out of the monstrously ugly plan that finally emerged from the Senate after long months of shady alliances, disgraceful back-room deals, outlandish payoffs and abject capitulation to the insurance companies and giant pharmaceutical outfits.

The public interest? Forget about it.

With the power elite consumed with its incessant, discordant fiddling over health care, the economic plight of ordinary Americans, from the middle class to the very poor, got pathetically short shrift. And there is no evidence, even now, that leaders of either party fully grasp the depth of the crisis, which began long before the official start of the Great Recession in December 2007.

A new study from the Brookings Institution tells us that the largest and fastest-growing population of poor people in the U.S. is in the suburbs. You don’t hear about this from the politicians who are always so anxious to tell you, in between fund-raisers and photo-ops, what a great job they’re doing. From 2000 to 2008, the number of poor people in the U.S. grew by 5.2 million, reaching nearly 40 million. That represented an increase of 15.4 percent in the poor population, which was more than twice the increase in the population as a whole during that period.

The study does not include data from 2009, when so many millions of families were just hammered by the recession. So the reality is worse than the Brookings figures would indicate.

Job losses, stagnant or reduced wages over the past decade, and the loss of home equity when the housing bubble burst have combined to take a horrendous toll on families who thought they had done all the right things and were living the dream. A great deal of that bleeding is in the suburbs. The study, compiled by the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program, said, “Suburbs gained more than 2.5 million poor individuals, accounting for almost half of the total increase in the nation’s poor population since 2000.”

Democrats in search of clues as to why voters are unhappy may want to take a look at the report. In 2008, a startling 91.6 million people - more than 30 percent of the entire U.S. population - fell below 200 percent of the federal poverty line, which is a meager $21,834 for a family of four.

The question for Democrats is whether there is anything that will wake them up to their obligation to extend a powerful hand to ordinary Americans and help them take the government, including the Supreme Court, back from the big banks, the giant corporations and the myriad other predatory interests that put the value of a dollar high above the value of human beings.

The Democrats still hold the presidency and large majorities in both houses of Congress. The idea that they are not spending every waking hour trying to fix the broken economic system and put suffering Americans back to work is beyond pathetic. Deficit reduction is now the mantra in Washington, which means that new large-scale investments in infrastructure and other measures to ease the employment crisis and jump-start the most promising industries of the 21st century are highly unlikely.

What we’ll get instead is rhetoric. It’s cheap, so we can expect a lot of it.

Those at the bottom of the economic heap seem all but doomed in this environment. The Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston put the matter in stark perspective after analyzing the employment challenges facing young people in Chicago: “Labor market conditions for 16-19 and 20-24-year-olds in the city of Chicago in 2009 are the equivalent of a Great Depression-era, especially for young black men.”

The Republican Party has abandoned any serious approach to the nation’s biggest problems, economic or otherwise. It may be resurgent, but it’s not a serious party. That leaves only the Democrats, a party that once championed working people and the poor, but has long since lost its way.

UK Telegraph: December was the worst month for US unemployment since the Great Recession began.

Grandpa — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 13:02:33 -0800

America slides deeper into depression as Wall Street revels
December was the worst month for US unemployment since the Great Recession began.

People gather across the street from the New York Stock Exchange in New York Oct. 24, 1929. Thousands of investors lost their savings in the worst stock market crash in Wall Street history five days later.
History repeating itself? President Obama has been accused by some economists of making the same mistakes policymakers in the US made in the Great Depression, which followed the Wall Street crash of 1929, pictured Photo: AP

The labour force contracted by 661,000. This did not show up in the headline jobless rate because so many Americans dropped out of the system. The broad U6 category of unemployment rose to 17.3pc. That is the one that matters.

Wall Street rallied. Bulls hope that weak jobs data will postpone monetary tightening: a silver lining in every catastrophe, or perhaps a further exhibit of market infantilism.

The home foreclosure guillotine usually drops a year or so after people lose their job, and exhaust their savings. The local sheriff will escort them out of the door, often with some sympathy –– just like the police in 1932, mostly Irish Catholics who tithed 1pc of their pay for soup kitchens.

Realtytrac says defaults and repossessions have been running at over 300,000 a month since February. One million American families lost their homes in the fourth quarter. Moody's Economy.com expects another 2.4m homes to go this year. Taken together, this looks awfully like Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath.

Judges are finding ways to block evictions. One magistrate in Minnesota halted a case calling the creditor "harsh, repugnant, shocking and repulsive". We are not far from a de facto moratorium in some areas.

This is how it ended between 1932 and 1934, when half the US states declared moratoria or "Farm Holidays". Such flexibility innoculated America's democracy against the appeal of Red Unions and Coughlin Fascists. The home siezures are occurring despite frantic efforts by the Obama administration to delay the process.

This policy is entirely justified given the scale of the social crisis. But it also masks the continued rot in the housing market, allows lenders to hide losses, and stores up an ever larger overhang of unsold properties. It takes heroic naivety to think the US housing market has turned the corner (apologies to Goldman Sachs, as always). The fuse has yet to detonate on the next mortgage bomb, $134bn (£83bn) of "option ARM" contracts due to reset violently upwards this year and next.

US house prices have eked out five months of gains on the Case-Shiller index, but momentum stalled in October in half the cities even before the latest surge of 40 basis points in mortgage rates. Karl Case (of the index) says prices may sink another 15pc. "If the 2008 and 2009 loans go bad, then we're back where we were before – in a nightmare."

David Rosenberg from Gluskin Sheff said it is remarkable how little traction has been achieved by zero rates and the greatest fiscal blitz of all time. The US economy grew at a 2.2pc rate in the third quarter (entirely due to Obama stimulus). This compares to an average of 7.3pc in the first quarter of every recovery since the Second World War.

Fed hawks are playing with fire by talking up about exit strategies, not for the first time. This is what they did in June 2008. We know what happened three months later. For the record, manufacturing capacity use at 67.2pc, and "auto-buying intentions" are the lowest ever.

The Fed's own Monetary Multiplier crashed to an all-time low of 0.809 in mid-December. Commercial paper has shrunk by $280bn ($175bn) in since October. Bank credit has been racing down a hair-raising black run since June. It has dropped from $10.844 trillion to $9.013 trillion since November 25. The MZM money supply is contracting at a 3pc annual rate. Broad M3 money is contracting at over 5pc.

Professor Tim Congdon from International Monetary Research said the Fed is baking deflation into the pie later this year, and perhaps a double-dip recession. Europe is even worse.

This has not stopped an army of commentators is trying to bounce the Fed into early rate rises. They accuse Ben Bernanke of repeating the error of 2004 when the Fed waited too long. Sometimes you just want to scream. In 2004 there was no housing collapse, unemployment was 5.5pc, banks were in rude good health, and the Fed Multiplier was 1.73.

How anybody can see imminent inflation in the dying embers of core PCE, just 0.1pc in November, is beyond me.

Mr Rosenberg is asked by clients why Wall Street does not seem to agree with his grim analysis.

His answer is that this is the same Mr Market that bought stocks in October 1987 when they were 25pc overvalued on Shiller "10-year normalized earnings basis" – exactly as they are today – and bought them at even more overvalued prices in 2007, long after the property crash had begun, Bear Stearns funds had imploded, and credit had its August heart attack. The stock market has become a lagging indicator. Tear up the textbooks.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/696263...

Tom Brady: Marriage, Kids Don't Hurt My Career

kty — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 09:26:37 -0800

By Charlotte Triggs
Tom Brady has a message to critics who say the Patriots' recent losses have anything to do with his personal life: Back off! "Hopefully because I got married, that doesn't effect the way I play quarterback," Brady, 32, said in his weekly radio interview with the Dennis & Callahan show on WEEI Sports Radio. "That's not something I've thought much about ... That my performance as a football player is going to go down because I got married or I had children." Critics have said that Brady, who led his team through an undefeated season in 2007 before losing the Superbowl to the New York Giants, has seemed distracted this year. But Brady, who married supermodel Gisele Bündchen in two ceremonies in Santa Monica and Costa Rica last year, and welcomed a new baby, Benjamin, in December, disagrees. It's funny for me – there's not a lot of things going on in my life other than my career and my family," he said. "I think my life is very focused," he added. And there's no doubt about his priorities. "I prioritized with the things that are important to me. That's my family and my football career. There's nothing other than that."