Stephen Lendman

There is none, and it's getting worse under a president and his predecessor's policies - engineering and sustaining economic decline, not recovery, Obama's latest announced job creation program as bogus as his April 2009 $787 billion stimulus. At the time, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said, besides bailing out Wall Street, it would create millions of jobs and get credit flowing again.

Wrong and he knew it. Credit contraction persists. Job creation is moribund. The true unemployment rate, by 1980 calculations, is 22%, not the bogus 9.6%, and recovery focused on Wall Street, not small business and job creation. The Treasury was looted. Trillions of dollars went to banks, shadow banks (like hedge funds) and insurers, not industrial America, a shadow of its former self by design. More on that below.

As a result, the stock market recovered (a likely blip in a bear market), not the economy. Fiscally, Obama's $787 package flopped. Half went for tax cuts with little impact. The rest didn't create jobs. It went for extended unemployment insurance, subsidized medical premiums for the unemployed, some aid to states, and a one-time $250 bonus to Social Security recipients - all stopgap measures, not long-term fixes.

Obama's earlier and current approach is market-directed to buy time, hoping business will recover on its own. It was never then or now about creating jobs or about resurrecting the fading middle class, what long-term policy aims to destroy, the current crisis accelerating the process, what Obama omitted from his Labor Day speech, disingenuous like his others, saying he wants to create jobs by:

"rebuilding and modernizing America's roads, rails and runways for the long-term....All of this will not only create jobs now, but will make our economy run better over the long haul."

Admitting we're in "difficult times," he absolves himself of blame and won't say he plans to extend the Bush tax cuts for the rich post-election, instead of acting responsibly by redistributing them to lower income households needing it, not millionaires and billionaires using them to speculate, not spend, leaving consumption and job creation unaided.

Obama's "yes we can" helps the privileged, not Main Street, suffering under his administration's neglect, disdainful of the constituency that elected him.

Kourosh Ziabari

This is Ahmed, performing "Wudu" in a Yemeni mosque. Before they
begin wudu, Muslims state that they intend to worship God with a
pure heart. This is very important. Washing and praying are meaning-
less if they are not done for the right reason.

You might be unfamiliar with the concept of "Wudu". It's an Islamic practice including the washing of some parts of body such as the hands, arms and face in order to get prepared for saying prayers or reciting the Holy Quran. It's is of high value in the Islamic tradition, because it's a preface to inner purity and satisfies the Almighty Creator who wants its creatures to be pure and clean once they want to talk to Him. Wudu is translated into English as "ablution". One who is in the state of Wudu, that is has washed his face, hands, arms and feet, is obliged to adhere to some certain codes of morality, including devotion to honesty, justice and sincerity. One who is in the state of Wudu is supposed not to tell lie, not to judge with prejudice and partiality and not to state or claim what is unrighteous and unfair.

Prior to setting off for writing this article, I conducted "Wudu" and promised myself not to get out of the borders of honesty and objectivity. I promised myself to propose what is my concern in a manner that is justifiable and virtuous, and pose a few questions as someone who has been entitled to ask freely, without being disrupted by projection or disturbance.

It was on the news headlines that the Florida-based Dove World Outreach Center church pastor Terry Jones has decided to burn a set of Qurans on the advent of September 11 in an action which is deemed to be a remonstration against what is introduced as "Islamic extremism".

Regrettably, Wayne Sapp who is an associate pastor of the Dove World Outreach Center has proclaimed that burning the Holy Quran is a direction God wants them to go. "We are convinced this is the direction God wants us to go. That's the only reason we're doing it in the first place," he told the reporters.

Gilad Atzmon
Gilad Atzmon's Blog

"As things stand, Israel, in its current ideological state, is categorically unable to lead the region into reconciliation. It lacks the necessary ingredients that are needed in order to think in terms of harmony and reconciliation."

Needless to mention, I don’t hold my breath for the outcome of the current ‘peace talks’. As I have mentioned many times before, Israelis are not interested in peace as they fail to grasp what peace is all about or what it stands for. Shalom, the Hebrew word for peace, is interpreted by Israelis and most Jews as ‘security for the Jews’. Shalom therefore has nothing to do with reconciliation or living amongst others. Shalom is a judeo-centric concept, it conveys an image of hope to one people only. The Israeli Palestinian conflict can never be resolved by a ‘shalom initiative’. Shalom is there to split the land and separate the people. It is there to deny the Palestinians of their elementary rights such as the Right of Return.

But let us assume for a second that I am completely wrong in my reading of the Israelis and their cultural and political understandings. Let’s for that purpose look into an imaginary scenario in which an Israeli PM wakes up one sunny morning with the unusual determination to bring about true peace. In the wee small hours, wisdom embraces him or her. He or she realises that Israel is in fact Palestine: it is stretched over historic Palestine at the expense of the Palestinian people, their livelihood and their history. He or she grasps that the Palestinians are the indigenous people of the land, and the rockets they shoot from time to time are nothing but love letters to their stolen villages, orchards, vineyards and fields.

Alan Caruba
Warning Signs

"Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century's developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age." ~ Dr. Richard Lindzen

It’s rare to come across a newspaper editorial in which virtually every assertion is false, but is absurdly titled “Face Facts.”

Since 1988 the movement behind the global warming fraud has labored long and hard to mislead the citizens of the world to believe what is surely the greatest "science" hoax ever perpetrated.

However, when the leak of emails between the handful of climate scientists who conjured up the deliberately misleading data the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) used hit the Internet, the November 2009 event was quickly dubbed “Climategate.” In one exchange, they worried over the fact that, since the late 1990s, the Earth was demonstrably getting cooler.

It is hard to believe that any journalist could not know about Climategate or the subsequent failure of the IPCC’s Copenhagen climate conference that even the President attended as the entire hoax came unraveled.

“The wildfires in Russia, the floods in Pakistan and the record heat this summer in New Jersey have one thing in common: They are exactly the kind of symptoms scientists predicted we’d experience as global warming occurs.”

Only there is no global warming. The Earth has been in a decade-old cooling cycle.