Mariano Rivera at Rangers-Coyotes game, 12/16/10

Tweet

NY City Hall ghostwrote letter to help Ground Zero mosque group while St. Nicholas Church destroyed by Islam at Ground Zero gets bupkis

Tweet 12/24/10, "City Hall ghostwrote GZ mosque's letter," NY Post, Sally Goldenberg

"Dozens of e-mails between Mayor Bloomberg's aides and developers of the proposed mosque near Ground Zero reveal a cordial, if not downright cozy, relationship and the length to which a top city staffer went to help the project -- even drafting a letter for the group

• soliciting support from the community board, and providing the fax number to send it.

In one exchange, Community Affairs Commissioner Nazli Parvizi penned the draft of a letter to be sent by Daisy Khan, a key sponsor of the project known alternately as Cordoba House or Park51,

• to the chairperson of Community Board 1, Julie Menin,

• as the panel prepared to vote on its recommendation on the project.

The letter drafted by Parvizi thanked Menin for being open-minded about the plan for a mosque and cultural center -- which by then had become a flashpoint issue around the nation.

Parvizi e-mailed the draft to Khan and her husband, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf -- ending with the salutation, "Best, Daisy,"

• indicating that she actually was preparing Khan's letter to a city agency.

She also included the fax number and mailing address for CB1 -- which ultimately voted in favor of the project in May --

• and offered further assistance.

The letter -- which Menin said she never received -- thanked her personally for "giving us an audience to share our vision of the Cordoba Center in Manhattan."

"We are incredibly saddened by the media distortion on what this project actually is and to whom it serves," Parvizi went on to write, according to a May 14 e-mail the Mayor's Office made public yesterday.

• Opponents of the plan were furious.

"The mayor was touting, ironically, government

• not being involved in religion,
  

and here you have the mayor's staffer assisting in a public-relations campaign on behalf of a mosque and Islamic center," said Debra Burlingame, whose brother was a pilot of one of the hijacked planes on 9/11.

"I think this is highly improper.""

St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church at Ground Zero was completely destroyed by Islamic terrorists in 2001 but gets no help from NYC.

NYC Mayor Bloomberg intervened for Ground Zero mosque group

Tweet 12/24/10, "Records: Mayor intervened for mosque group," AP by Chris Hawley

"Mayor Michael Bloomberg's office worked behind the scenes to help the organizers of a mosque and community center near Ground Zero, intervening with city administrators to get a temporary prayer service permit and having an official ghostwrite a letter to community leaders.

E-mails released by the city document the cooperation between Bloomberg's Community Affairs Unit and the Cordoba Initiative, even as a furor erupted this year over the center's proposed existence two blocks north of Ground Zero. The city released the documents

• in response to a public-records lawsuit by Judicial Watch, a conservative group.

Bloomberg's spokesman said the city has extended similar help to other religious groups. But Judicial Watch says the e-mails show the city government went too far with its assistance.

Bloomberg has been one of the strongest supporters of the project, which drew huge protests on both sides in the months before the ninth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. Opponents argued that locating a mosque so close to the attack site is insensitive to the victims' memories. Bloomberg and other supporters have said allowing the center to be built reflects American values of tolerance and religious freedom.

• The city's help was no different than the assistance it gives other organizations, Bloomberg spokesman Stu Loeser said.

"It is nothing out of the ordinary. This is what the Community Affairs Unit does," he said, citing assistance the mayor's office gave Roman Catholic officials in composing a letter to community boards asking for their help with a papal visit and in rushing through a permit for a temporary hut erected for a Jewish holiday.

In May, Nazli Parvizi, the head of the city's community affairs unit, composed a 500-word letter to send to Community Board 1, an advisory council in lower Manhattan, about the mosque project.

The draft of Parvizi's letter describes the center as

• a "wonderful expression of our religion" and laments "media distortion" of the project.
  

The letter in e-mails was signed by Daisy Khan, the wife of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the man behind the project.

• In August, Bloomberg cited the community board's support in a speech endorsing the project.

In January the Cordoba Initiative asked Bloomberg's commissioner of immigrant affairs, Fatima Shama, for help getting a temporary permit to hold Friday worship services at the proposed site. The city had approved permits for previous weeks, and the group believed the omission was due to a clerical error.

• Shama responded a few hours later, saying the problem had been fixed.

As public anger over the mosque began to spread in May, supporters turned to the city for advice.

• "Is there a good time to chat tomorrow. We need some guidance on how to tackle the opposition," Khan wrote to Shama.

The e-mails also document donations of $300 from the Cordoba Initiative and $150 from the American Society for Muslim Advancement, a sister group, to help pay for an Aug. 24, 2009, dinner celebrating the holy Islamic month of Ramadan at the mayor's residence.

• Loeser said the donations did not influence the mayor's support of the project.

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said the documents show the city was an active proponent of the project. "He obviously feels strongly about it, but he

shouldn't turn the taxpayers of New York into advocates for this group," Fitton said."...

The most important thing to know about the Tea Party "is that there are more of them than ever before in American history." Spengler

Tweet And we are just beginning to come of age. Speaking as a supporter, the Tea Party isn't only about finances and Obama, though those issues alone could end the country.

• Being routinely scorned by George Bush and his cronies got many of us going.

Those career politicians and lobbyists still populate the GOP and still scorn us. Every one of them must go. Someone once said, "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned." It can apply to men as well.

12/7/10, "Longevity gives life to Tea Party," Spengler

"How could the Tea Party elect five senators and 40 members of the United States Congress last November, none with political experience and many with evident eccentricities? The answer is that a single issue united a slapdash agglomeration of amateurs, with sufficient power to override all the sources of weakness.

The Tea Party represents creditors of the government who do not want to be cheated out of their savings; that is, people close to retirement age who fear slow confiscation by inflation. Governments that run huge deficits normally reduce them by debasing the currency, in order to repay their debts in inflated money.

In fact, the Tea Party is a triumph of economic rationality over lack of talent: its reason for being is so compelling and so clear that it has succeeded despite the silliness of some of its candidates. One top Republican pollster thinks that the "I am not a witch" message aired by losing Tea Party candidate Christine O'Donnell in Delware was the

• single worst piece of advertising in political history.

Elite commentators tend to dismiss the Tea Party as a mob of engaged boos. On the contrary, pollster Scott Rasmussen, reports, the Tea Partiers tend to be older than 45, married, wealthier and better educated than the general population, and concerned first of all with federal spending and deficits.

• The most important thing to know about such people is that there are more of them than ever before in American history.

Young families with small children borrow money from older people who have finished raising families. Most Americans begin adulthood heavily in debt and become lenders as they approach retirement. The changing proportions of young and old Americans has enormous bearing on political outcomes.

Elderly dependents have remained fairly static as a percentage of total population during the past 40 years. But the proportion will jump from 19% today to 32% in 2030. This seismic change in American demographics explains a great deal.

In 1975, when Jimmy Carter ran for president, 39 out 100 Americans were dependent children, but only 16 out of 100 Americans were dependent elderly. The baby boomers were in their twenties and starting families. Once elected president, Carter allowed the inflation rate to reach double-digits by 1981. A family that bought a house for $60,000 in January 1975 could have sold it for $110,000 in January 1981. In fact, home prices offered positive returns after inflation (stocks, bonds, and cash all showed negative real returns during the 1980s).

Elderly people on fixed pensions took part-time jobs or ate pet food as the value of money shrank; young people caught a free ride on the inflation wave. No one liked inflation, to be sure, but it was an ill wind that blew good to a great many people. The Carter administration, though, made an elementary blunder: as inflation drove up nominal income, it also pushed middle class taxpayers into higher tax brackets intended to soak the rich. With a top tax rate of 70%, the tax squeeze due to inflation became a crushing burden on the middle class, and the high rate of taxation on nominal capital gains was often confiscatory. If the Carter administration had indexed tax rates to inflation, it might have lasted a second term.

Now the tables are turned. By 2030, elderly dependents will comprise 32% of the American population, twice the level in 1975.

• For the first time in history, the number of elderly dependents will equal the number of child dependents. Americans now aged 45 will retire in 2030, and it is their concerns that give buoyancy to the Tea Party.

The Tea Party is an exercise in economic rationality. Measured inflation in the United States is less than 1% (according to the woefully inadequate Consumer Price Index), but the Tea Partiers anticipate higher inflation in the future should the federal government remain at 11% of gross domestic product.

This is not the first time that monetary issues have motivated the formation of an important third party. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a prolonged deflation under the gold standard drew Western farmers to the inflationist Free Silver movement. Permitting silver coinage would have increased the money supply, raised the price level and helped debtors. The movement was powerful enough to take over the Democratic Party in 1896, when its candidate William Jennings Bryan (an unknown 36-year-old congressman) excoriated Eastern creditor interests and their ''cross of gold'' imposed by Eastern creditor interests.

• The proportion of prospective pensioners in the rest of the industrial world exceeds that in the United States...

America's open political model makes it relatively easy for challengers to force their way onto the stage (although not to remain their for long), so the Tea Party as such is likely to remain a distinctly American phenomenon. But the shift towards an older population also will act as a brake on inflationist impulses elsewhere,

• for example, on the extent to which France and Germany will bail out Ireland, Portugal, Greece, or Spain.

In its first electoral outing, America's Tea Party helped shift the political balance. It would be incautious to view it as a passing expression of voter frustration. On the contrary: spontaneity and inexperience held the Tea Party back from harvesting the political support that should come to it. If the Tea Party does a better job of screening and prepping candidates - or the Republican party has the good sense to adopt its program -

• demographics and rational interest will make it an

even stronger force as time passes, and an obstacle to a new inflation cycle."

####

• (As for the left, they believe the country is theirs because we will be dead soon. Many Tea Partiers are in their 40's or younger, so they'll have a long wait. They hope to hurry us off by giving us a UK style medical system where seniors are routinely left to starve. They figure in a few years we'll be gone, and a snakepit of crime, poverty and despair will be theirs. A land mass with no borders. But our numbers are just beginning.
  

We didn't work our whole lives to watch some slobs throw the country down the toilet to George Soros and his relatives. ed)

Individuals in Kenyan government stealing a third of national funds. Africa is poor because of corrupt leaders NOT 'climate'

Tweet 12/3/10, "Kenyan corruption costs government dearly," BBC

"The Kenyan government has said it could be losing nearly one-third of the national budget to corruption.

• Finance ministry officials told a parliamentary committee the losses could be nearly $4bn (£2.5bn) a year.

They said individuals were taking huge sums meant for development projects.

• Analysts say many Kenyans will be surprised not by the news of the losses, but by the fact the
  

admission has come from such senior officials.

• Kitu kidogo - the Swahili for "something small" - is how the kickbacks are commonly described in Kenya.

Taking 10% of an awarded tender or inflating project costs are said to be the commonest means of dipping into government coffers.

• Corruption has been the Achilles heel of successive Kenyan regimes.

But the efforts of the country's newly-appointed anti-corruption commissioner - who now has the power to prosecute individuals -

• are causing ripples in government quarters."

Reference: 11/9/10, BBC, "French appeals reopens African assets case"

• 3 African leaders accused of stealing $223 million from their goverments

"France's highest appeals court has authorised judges to proceed with an investigation into assets held in the country by three African leaders.

• The anti-corruption group Transparency International has accused the three of using African public funds to buy luxury homes and cars in France....

The three leaders, one of whom is now dead, had denied wrongdoing.

• They are Denis Sassou-Nguesso of the Republic of the Congo and
  

• Teodoro Obiang Nguema of Equatorial Guinea, as well as
  

• the late Gabonese leader, Omar Bongo (whose living relatives are also named).
  

Transparency estimates the total value of the three leaders' estates in France at 160m euros (£140m, $223m)."...

.