Sunday, January 22, 2012

Rick Santelli's Chicago Tea Party

Rick Santelli's Chicago Tea Party

Should I Put My Money in Caribbean Tax Havens Like Mitt Romney Does?

Posted: 21 Jan 2012 05:20 PM PST


By Jordan Weissmann, The Atlantic

Mitt Romney has millions of dollars spread around at least a dozen investment funds run by Bain Capital out of the Cayman Islands, a notorious tax haven, as ABC News reported on Wednesday. This raises some tricky questions, including but not limited to: Isn’t this awfully suspicious? How does a tax haven work? And, should I get one? The short answers are, respectively: No, it’s complicated but we’ll explain, and probably not.

Is Mitt Romney hiding his money illegally?

No. Moving your money to an obscure tax-haven sounds suspicious, but as far as anybody knows, Romney’s investments are above board. If he was trying to hide his money, he’d be doing a pretty terrible job, considering all this information was discovered through public documents.

Before get into why some of Romney’s money is on vacay in the Caribbean, we should talk about who actually controls his investments. Technically, Romney isn’t supposed to have a say in where his fortune goes. To avoid potential conflicts of interest when he became governor of Massachusetts, Romney put his wealth in a “blind trust,” which he supposedly has no hand in managing.

To read more, visit: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/01/should-i-put-my-money-in-caribbean-tax-havens-like-mitt-romney-does/251732/

U.S. Stocks Advance a Third Week on Improved Economic Reports, Earnings

Posted: 21 Jan 2012 05:07 PM PST

By Ksenia Galouchko – Bloomberg.com

U.S. stocks rose for a third week, the longest winning streak since October, as better-than- estimated economic data and company earnings boosted confidence in American growth.

Technology and energy companies led rallies by nine out of 10 Standard & Poor's 500 Index groups, climbing more than 2.7 percent. Sears Holdings Corp. added 46 percent amid speculation it may go private and optimism CIT Group Inc. will approve financing for the retailer's vendors. Bank of America Corp. (BAC) led Dow Jones Industrial Average gains after posting a profit. International Business Machines Corp. increased 5.2 percent after forecasting earnings that beat analysts' estimates.

The S&P 500 advanced 2 percent to 1,315.38 this week. It has gained 4.6 percent in 2012, the best start to a year since 1997. The Dow gained 298.42 points, or 2.4 percent, to 12,720.48 this week, reaching the highest level since July 21.

"The domestic economy is strong and that's helped the stock market," Mark Bronzo, who helps manage $23.4 billion at Security Global Investors in Irvington, New York, said in a telephone interview. "The market's done pretty well in the face of some good earnings news and it seems to be overcoming some of the fears around Europe."

To read more, visit:  http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-20/u-s-stocks-advance-a-third-week-on-economic-reports-earnings.html

Cyberattack prevented from crippling DOJ website, official says

Posted: 21 Jan 2012 04:59 PM PST


From FOXNews.com

WASHINGTON – A former senior intelligence official tells Fox News the justice department pulled its website offline Thursday evening, following signs hackers planned a denial of service attack on the site — an assault clearly linked to arrests in New Zealand of a massive, worldwide piracy ring.

Hackers aligned with the global cyber-collective known as Anonymous claimed responsibility Thursday for taking down at least six prominent websites, including those of the U.S. Department of Justice and Universal Music Group. The hackers said their actions were retaliation for the shutdown of content-sharing site Megaupload.com and the arrest of several related to the site.

But the intelligence official tells a slightly different story, saying there were signs early on a cyberassault was imminent. The denial of service attack on the justice department website brought a surge of Internet traffic — raising it from 50 hits a minute to beyond 1,000 hits — at which point the DOJ took the site offline to install filters based on the incoming IP addresses.

Fox is told the incident lasted about 5 hours.

"The investigation is like a fresh crime scene," the source told Fox News. "You got a body and a guy holding a smoking gun, but you don't know if he's the one who pulled the trigger. In this case whether Anonymous is really behind it."

To read more, visit:

Scientists to Pause Research on Deadly Strain of Bird Flu

Posted: 21 Jan 2012 04:56 PM PST


By DENISE GRADY, The New York Times

The scientists who altered a deadly flu virus to make it more contagious have agreed to suspend their research for 60 days to give other international experts time to discuss the work and determine how it can proceed without putting the world at risk of a potentially catastrophic pandemic.

Suspensions of biomedical research are almost unheard of; the only other one in the United States was a moratorium from 1974 to 1976 on some types of recombinant DNA research, because of safety concerns.

A letter explaining the flu decision is being published in two scientific journals, Science and Nature, which also plan to publish reports on the research, but in a redacted form, omitting details that would let other researchers copy the experiments. The letter is signed by the scientists who produced the new, more contagious form of the flu virus, as well as by more than 30 other leading flu researchers.

To read more, visit: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/21/science/scientists-to-pause-research-on-deadly-strain-of-bird-flu.html?_r=1&hp

Cain To Give Tea Party SOTU Response

Posted: 21 Jan 2012 04:52 PM PST


By Kevin Liptak, CNN

The Tea Party Express announced Thursday it would again provide its own response to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address, this year with former presidential candidate Herman Cain as the headliner.

Cain, who dropped out of the 2012 race in December, will deliver the rebuttal to Obama January 24.

Traditionally, a single member of the opposing party has delivered a response to the president’s annual address. House Speaker John Boehner named Republican Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels as the official Republican responder Thursday. The Tea Party Express said in a statement they weren’t trying to undercut Daniels, but rather offer another conservative viewpoint.

“We are enthusiastic that a successful conservative governor like Mitch Daniels of Indiana will be giving the Republican response,” Sal Russo, chief strategist of the Tea Party Express, said in a statement. “I know that both Governor Daniels and Mr. Cain will contribute important ideas for the future of our country.”

To read more, visit:  http://www.wisn.com/r/30254298/detail.html

Subculture of Americans prepares for civilization’s collapse

Posted: 21 Jan 2012 04:47 PM PST

By Jim Forsyth, Reuters

When Patty Tegeler looks out the window of her home overlooking the Appalachian Mountains in southwestern Virginia, she sees trouble on the horizon.

“In an instant, anything can happen,” she told Reuters. “And I firmly believe that you have to be prepared.”

Tegeler is among a growing subculture of Americans who refer to themselves informally as “preppers.” Some are driven by a fear of imminent societal collapse, others are worried about terrorism, and many have a vague concern that an escalating series of natural disasters is leading to some type of environmental cataclysm.

They are following in the footsteps of hippies in the 1960s who set up communes to separate themselves from what they saw as a materialistic society, and the survivalists in the 1990s who were hoping to escape the dictates of what they perceived as an increasingly secular and oppressive government.

Preppers, though are, worried about no government.

Tegeler, 57, has turned her home in rural Virginia into a “survival center,” complete with a large generator, portable heaters, water tanks, and a two-year supply of freeze-dried food that her sister recently gave her as a birthday present. She says that in case of emergency, she could survive indefinitely in her home. And she thinks that emergency could come soon.

To read more, visit:  http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/21/us-usa-civilization-collapse-idUSTRE80K0LA20120121

Scalia on unlimited political ads: Turn off the TV

Posted: 21 Jan 2012 04:40 PM PST


From FOXNews.com | Associated Press

COLUMBIA, S.C. – U.S. Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia has a simple solution for people who don’t like all the political advertisements unleashed by the court’s decision two years ago that ended limits on corporate contributions in political campaigns — change the channel or turn off the TV.

Scalia was asked about the decision during a presentation before the South Carolina Bar on Saturday, exactly two years after the court handed down the 5-4 decision in the case that led to the rise of Super PACs. They are outside groups affiliated with candidates that can take in unlimited contributions as long as they don’t directly coordinate with the candidate.

“I don’t care who is doing the speech — the more the merrier,” Scalia said. “People are not stupid. If they don’t like it, they’ll shut it off.”

Scalia was joined on stage by Justice Stephen Breyer, who voted on the losing side in the decision which has become known as “Citizens United,” for the group that successfully sued over federal campaign finance laws. Breyer didn’t directly criticize the ruling, instead pointing out how it is critical in the American system that people respect the decisions the judiciary makes.

To read more, visit:  http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/01/21/scalia-on-unlimited-political-ads-turn-off-tv/
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