Four Major GOP Candidates Remain After Cain “Suspends” Campaign

Herman Cain has now “suspended” his campaign for the 2012 Republican nomination for President of the United States. Mr. Cain cited “continued distractions and continued hurt on me and my family.” Mr. Cain had been the target of claims of past sexual harassment and a long standing sexual affair with an Atlanta woman. With Mr. Cain’s withdrawal, there seem to be four remaining candidates atop the GOP Presidential field:  Mitt Romney, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Newt Gingrich. Former Republican Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney in 2012 is running against himself from his race for Governor of the State of Massachusetts. Governor Romney has also lost credibility regarding his efforts as a “job creator.” Romney’s  prior private sector business, Bain Capital, and Goldman Sachs purchased two Florida medical diagnostics firms, closed them and 850 jobs were lost; Bain and Goldman made $250 million on the deal. Romney’s net worth went up to some $250 million during this time. Meanwhile, former Republican Speaker of the US House of Representatives Newt Gingrich is running against what he said as recently as a week before his last statement on some issues. Gingrich is no stranger to controversy as he was cited for ethics violations and fined $300,000 while serving as the Republican Speaker of the US House in January of 1997. Mr. Gingrich has also been criticized for extra-marital affairs and leaving two wives as they suffered from multiple sclerosis and cancer. One ex had to sue Gingrich for child support as she suffered and survived on charity as Gingrich served in the US House. Mr. Gingrich had carried on an affair with his now third wife even as his second wife was suffering from cancer.

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More details on the $16 trillion backdoor bank bailout

Today I received a mass emailing from Alan Grayson. I had previously heard about this backdoor bailout by reviewing an article by Bernie Sanders and see here. Nonetheless, I hadn't before seen the details of massive loans made by the Fed to banks and non-banks. These numbers are mind-boggling. Click on Grayson’s link to the Federal Reserve report (below) with the outrageously sterilized title: “FEDERAL RESERVE SYSTEM: Opportunities Exist to Strengthen Policies and Processes for Managing Emergency Assistance.” Then follow his road map in order to see the problems with your own eyes. I've printed Grayson's entire mass mailing below. Consider that the Fed created $16 TRILLION and distributed much of it to foreign banks. This amount is 20 times bigger than the publicly disclosed TARP, yet the American People were never given a chance to know about this or have their representatives vote on it. The banks tried to keep this backdoor bailout secret, but it took Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, neither Democrat nor a Republican (he is a democratic socialist), to raise hell in order to force the Federal Reserve to account for this backdoor bailout. And back then, it was believed that this backdoor bailout was "only" $2.2 trillion. One more thing: The total annual tax receipts of the United States are “only” $2 trillion. But, of course, based on the news media, you would think that the most important things going on concern Michael Jackson’s doctor and Herman Cain’s sex life. -- Dear Erich, I think it’s fair to say that Congressman Ron Paul and I are the parents of the GAO’s audit of the Federal Reserve. And I say that knowing full well that Dr. Paul has somewhat complicated views regarding gay marriage. Anyway, one of our love children is a massive 251-page GAO report technocratically entitled “Opportunities Exist to Strengthen Policies and Processes for Managing Emergency Assistance.” It is almost as weighty as that 13-lb. baby born in Germany last week, named Jihad. It also is the first independent audit of the Federal Reserve in the Fed’s 99-year history. Feel free to take a look at it yourself, it’s right here. It documents Wall Street bailouts by the Fed that dwarf the $700 billion TARP, and everything else you’ve heard about. I wouldn’t want anyone to think that I’m dramatizing or amplifying what this GAO report says, so I’m just going to list some of my favorite parts, by page number. Page 131 – The total lending for the Fed’s “broad-based emergency programs” was $16,115,000,000,000. That’s right, more than $16 trillion. The four largest recipients, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and Bank of America, received more than a trillion dollars each. The 5th largest recipient was Barclays PLC. The 8th was the Royal Bank of Scotland Group, PLC. The 9th was Deutsche Bank AG. The 10th was UBS AG. These four institutions each got between a quarter of a trillion and a trillion dollars. None of them is an American bank. Pages 133 & 137 – Some of these “broad-based emergency program” loans were long-term, and some were short-term. But the “term-adjusted borrowing” was equivalent to a total of $1,139,000,000,000 more than one year. That’s more than $1 trillion out the door. Lending for these programs in fact peaked at more than $1 trillion. [More . . . .]

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The unofficial Vietnam war continues on

In Washington D.C., Americans mourn the deaths of 58,000 American soldiers who were killed in combat in Vietnam.   After that war "ended," this happened:

Vietnam's prime minister says more than 42,000 people have been killed by bombs, mines and ordnance left from the Vietnam War, and more continue to die 36 years after the war ended.

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The brief history of traditional marriage

In the November 2011 issue of The Atlantic, Kate Bolick reviews the history of marriage, finding that "traditional marriage" is not so traditional. She reports that Stephanie Coontz, a social historian at Evergreen State College in Washington was

struck by how everyone believed in some mythical Golden Age of Marriage and saw mounting divorce rates as evidence of the dissolution of this halcyon past. She decided to write a book discrediting the notion and proving that the ways in which we think about and construct the legal union between a man and a woman have always been in flux. What Coontz found was even more interesting than she’d originally expected. In her fascinating Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage, she surveys 5,000 years of human habits, from our days as hunters and gatherers up until the present, showing our social arrangements to be more complex and varied than could ever seem possible. She’d long known that the Leave It to Beaver–style family model popular in the 1950s and ’60s had been a flash in the pan, and like a lot of historians, she couldn’t understand how people had become so attached to an idea that had developed so late and been so short-lived.
Bolick amply supports her well-written article with statistics such as these:
[W]e keep putting marriage off. In 1960, the median age of first marriage in the U.S. was 23 for men and 20 for women; today it is 28 and 26. Today, a smaller proportion of American women in their early 30s are married than at any other point since the 1950s, if not earlier. We’re also marrying less—with a significant degree of change taking place in just the past decade and a half. In 1997, 29 percent of my Gen X cohort was married; among today’s Millennials that figure has dropped to 22 percent. (Compare that with 1960, when more than half of those ages 18 to 29 had already tied the knot.) These numbers reflect major attitudinal shifts. According to the Pew Research Center, a full 44 percent of Millennials and 43 percent of Gen Xers think that marriage is becoming obsolete.
One of the most sobering themes of this article is that the economic decline of males has been bad news for marriage; women "as a whole have never been confronted with such a radically shrinking pool of what are traditionally considered to be 'marriageable' men--those who are better educated and earn more than they do."

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