Tag: news

The “wife” feud, which initially many though was merely a sideshow between Donal Trump and Ted Cruz, has taken a quick turn for the ugly and is escalating dramatically with every passing day, and now that even the National Enquirer has entered the fray, has rapidly devolved to nothing less than the surreal twilight zone.

For those who need a primer of what is rapidly becoming the biggest “issue” in the presidential race, here is a reminder, courtesy of our post from last night “Tough Guy Ted Warns “Sniveling Coward” Trump: “Leave My Wife Alone“:

• Phase 1: Cruz Reps “Cross The Line”, when a “SuperPAC” run by a Cruz supporter launched a Trump ad campaign showcasing a naked posing Melania Trump
• Phase 2: Trumps Warns Cruz: “Lyin’ Ted Cruz just used a picture of Melania from a G.Q. shoot in his ad. Be careful, Lyin’ Ted, or I will spill the beans on your wife!”
• Phase 3: Cruz firez back, warning Trump: Don’t Do The Same Thing To Me That [My Reps] Just Did To You (Or Else!).
• Phase 4: Trump Goes There, retweeting an image “comparing” Heidi Cruz and Melania Trump
• Phase 5: Cruz Goes Full Rambo, says  ‘Donald, you’re a sniveling coward and leave Heidi alone.’

Or, as we summed up, “a Cruz fan uses naked images of Trump’s wife to disparage him to saintly ‘Utah-ans’; Trump pissed; Cruz warns Trump not to reciprocate; Trump shows ugly picture of Cruz’s wife; Cruz unleashes inner Hulk as Trump dares to do what Cruz reps did to him.”

That was just the last few days.

And then the tabloids jumped on board.

Overnight, Trump-linked National Enquirer, alleged that the Texas senator is “hiding five different mistresses.” According to its source, identified as a “Washington insider,” “private detectives are digging into at least five affairs Ted Cruz supposedly had,” and “the leaked details are an attempt to destroy what’s left of his White House campaign.” The supposed affairs are detailed in the Enquirer’s most recent print issue.

National Enquirer: Ted Cruz had 5 affairs – Idk if true (but they did break the Tiger Woods affairs). http://pic.twitter.com/Olof2tPJA8

— Secular Talk (@KyleKulinski) March 25, 2016

Though unconfirmed, the rumor sparked chatter across social media Friday with the hashtag #CruzSexScandal, with reactions, as expected, ranging from one end of the spectrum to the other. 

Considering the source, we doubt there is much veracity to the alleged “Cruz sex scandal”, although the tabloid has had its share of “broken” news stores in the past.

As was to be expected, Cruz immediately denounced the article as “garbage, complete and utter lies” and accused his opponent Donald Trump of being the source of the story as Reuters reports.

“It’s tabloid smear, and it is a smear that has come from Donald Trump and his henchmen,” a clearly perturbed Cruz told reporters at a press conference in Wisconsin, as the battle for the Republican presidential nomination reached new levels of personal rancor.

Trump issued a statement saying he was not responsible for the article.

“I have nothing to do with the National Enquirer and unlike Lyin’ Ted Cruz I do not surround myself with political hacks and henchman and then pretend total innocence,” Trump said in the statement. “Ted Cruz’s problem with the National Enquirer is his and his alone, and while they were right about O.J. Simpson, John Edwards, and many others, I certainly hope they are not right about Lyin’ Ted Cruz.”

In other words, just as Cruz had “nothing” to do with the first naked photo of Melania that started off this latest scandal, so Trump had “nothing” to do with the Enquirer article.

Alas, the damage for Cruz may already have been done: the article exploded on Twitter overnight on Thursday. By Friday morning #CruzSexScandal was a worldwide trending topic on Twitter.

And while Trump has distanced himself from the Enquirer article, very much the same way Cruz distanced himself from the original attack ad, an aide to Donald Trump on Friday did fulfil the businessman’s threat to “spill the beans” on Republican presidential rival Ted Cruz’s wife, Heidi.

As The Hill first reported, Trump spokeswoman Katrina Pierson rattled off a list of attacks three days after Trump first made the threat. 

“Spilling the beans is quite simple when it comes to Heidi Cruz,” Pierson said in an interview with MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki. 

“She is a Bush operative; she worked for the architect of NAFTA, which has killed millions of jobs in this country; she was a member on the Council on Foreign Relations who — in Sen. Cruz’s own words, called a nest of snakes that seeks to undermine national sovereignty; and she’s been working for Goldman Sachs, the same global bank that Ted Cruz left off of his financial disclosure,” Pierson said. 

“Her entire career has been spent working against everything Ted Cruz says that he stands for,” she added. 

Cruz spokeswoman Alice Stewart responded to the remarks in a statement to The Hill, saying, “There’s no low the Trump campaign won’t go.”

Earlier in the MSNBC interview, Pierson said “this isn’t about Heidi Cruz, this is about Melania Trump. Melania Trump was the one that was attacked.”

Incidentally, she is right, even though that means that this most hypnotic scandal in the republican presidential primary race – and perhaps any US presidential race yet – is nowhere close to over as neither candidate can possibly concede defeat on a topic that is “near and dear” to the heart as one’s wife.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1MHnC2w Tyler Durden

Submitted by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

“We are not at war with Islam,” said John Kasich after the Brussels massacre, “We’re at war with radical Islam.”

Kasich’s point raises a question: Does the Islamic faith in any way sanction or condone what those suicide bombers did?

For surely the brothers and their accomplice who ignited the bombs in the airport and set off the explosion on the subway did not do so believing they were blasting themselves to hell for all eternity.

One has to assume they hoped to be martyrs to their faith if they slaughtered infidels to terrify and expel such as these from the Islamic world and advance the coming of the caliphate of which the Prophet preached.

And where might they have gotten such ideas?

Kasich’s word, radical, comes from the Latin “radix,” or root.

And if one returns to the roots of Islam, to the Quran, does one find condemnation of what the brothers did — or justification?

Andrew McCarthy was the prosecutor of the “Blind Sheikh” whose terrorist cell tried to bring down a World Trade Center tower in 1993, and plotted bombings in the Holland and Lincoln tunnels.

The U.S. government depicted the sheikh as a wanton killer who distorted the teachings of his faith.

Yet, McCarthy discovered that Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman was no imposter-imam, but “a globally renowned scholar — a doctor of Islamic jurisprudence who graduated from al-Azhar University in Cairo, the seat of Sunni Islamic learning for over a millennium.”

Seeking to expose the sheikh as a fraud who had led his gullible followers into terrorism, against the tenets of their faith, McCarthy discovered that “Abdel Rahman was not lying about Islam.”

“When he said the scriptures command that Muslims strike terror into the hearts of Islam’s enemies, the scriptures backed him up. When he said Allah enjoined all Muslims to wage jihad until Islamic law was established throughout the world, the scriptures backed him up.”

“[T]he Blind Sheikh’s summons to Islam was rooted in a coherent interpretation of Islamic doctrine. He was not perverting Islam,” writes McCarthy in the Hillsdale College letter Imprimis. McCarthy goes on:

“Islam is not a religion of peace. … Verses such as ‘Fight those who believe not in Allah,’ and ‘Fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem of war’ are not peaceful injunctions….”

In its formative first century, Islam conquered the Middle and Near East, North Africa and Spain with sword and slaughter, not persuasion and conversion.

Undeniably, there are millions of Muslims in America who love this country and have served it in every walk of life, from cops, firemen and soldiers, to doctors, scholars and clergy.

Yet when “moderate, peaceful Muslims” were called to testify as defense witnesses, says McCarthy, they could not contradict the Blind Sheikh’s claim that he had correctly interpreted the Quran.

The questions that arise are crucial.

When we call Islam a “religion of peace,” are we projecting our own hopes? Are we deceiving ourselves? Are the Muslims we respect, admire and like, as friends and patriots, assimilated and “Americanized” Muslims who have drifted away from, set aside, or rejected many core beliefs of the Quran and root teachings of their own faith?

Are they simply secularized Muslims?

When the Afghan regime we installed sought to cut off the head of a Christian convert, was that un-Islamic? Or does Islam teach that this is the way to deal with apostates?

Is the hate spewing forth from the Ayatollah toward Americans and Jews un-Islamic? Is the Saudis’ cutting off of heads and hands of adulterers and thieves and suppressing of women un-Islamic?

Or is that what the Quran actually teaches?

Have the Islamists of al-Shabab in Somalia, Boko Haram in Nigeria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, al-Qaida and ISIS in Syria and Iraq — who daily die fighting in the name of Islam — misread their sacred texts?

Are they all heretics who fail to understand the peaceful and loving character of their Islamic faith?

Or is the West deluding itself? Is it possible we are the ones misreading the sacred books of Islam and what the triumph of Islam would mean for our civilization — because we lack the courage to face the truth and do what is necessary to avoid our fate?

Islam is rising again. Of its 1.6 billion adherents worldwide, many are returning to the roots of their faith, seeking to live their lives as commanded by the Prophet, the Quran and Sharia.

Western survival would seem to dictate a halt to all immigration from lands where this deadly virus we call “radical Islam” — with which Kasich concedes we are at war — is rampant, just as we would halt immigration from lands where the bubonic plague was rampant.

That would surely contradict the cherished beliefs of Western liberals.

But, then, as James Burnham reminded us, “Liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide.”

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1SbExMD Tyler Durden

Back in January 2015, when we looked at the utterly disconnected fundamentals of the energy sector, we were stunned to note that the forward 12-month P/E for the Energy sector has risen above 22.4, the first time it had done so since April 8, 2002. On that date, the closing price of the Energy sector was 225.15 and the forward 12-month EPS estimate was $10.05.

Our amazement was contained in the following summary: “using the S&P Energy Sector Index data, the sector’s forward multiple is now an absolutely ridiculous, mindblowing 23x.“

This was 14 months ago. Where do we stand now?

The snapshot answer comes courtesy of the latest Factset weekly earnings insight, according to which as of this moment, the forward P/E of the Energy sector is no longer “an absolutely ridiculous and mindblowing 23x“…. it is, in fact, more than double that at 58.7x, which also happens to be more than four times higher than the 15 year average.

There is no longer a word to describe the lunacy where the forward P/E multiple was literally “off the chart” until the Y-axis was doubled.

 

Where it gets even more surreal is when looking at the forward energy sector P/E (as defined by Bloomberg) charted over time. Yes, we laughed long and hard.

 

What is beyond strange is that while forward earnings have imploded in just the past three months, prices of energy companies have actually gone up as the next Factset chart shows! In other words, the market’s discounting mechanism is not onlyl broke but is now going in reverse, where the worse the projected earnings, the better for stock prices.

 

However, this type of disconnect – especially when it is as glaring as this – never lasts.

In that vein, one year ago, when oil had first crashed hard and when the S&P energy sector was trading at 550, we calculated that “Either Oil Soars Back To $88, Or Energy Stocks Have To Tumble By Over 40%” Energy stocks indeed tumbled, and at one point the drop was nearly 40% as predicted, but have since jumped higher on more artificial central bank manipulation of prices.

 

Unfortunately for those buying, this rebound won’t last because while central banks may have goosed asset prices, they have failed to stimulate the price of the one all important commodity, the one which flows through to earnings: oil.

Which leads us to a redo of the simple calculation we did one year ago: what does the current disconnect between the price of oil, energy stock prices and valuations mean? The answer, like last January, is simple: either the long-term PE multiple is now null and void, and the “New Normal” forward PE of not only 20x+, but almost 60x, is “realistic”, which of course is ridiculous, or there are two alternatives:

• Energy sector earnings have to surge by 275%, implying oil prices have to more than triple to $148, for the forward P/E multiple to return to normal, or
• The Energy sector price has to crash from 461 today to 123 where it would trade down to its historic forward 14x P/E multiple, suggesting a price drop of over 70%!

This is shown visually on the table below:

We’ll let the algos decide which option works.

 

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1ZBaBii Tyler Durden

Submitted by Bill Bonner of Bonner & Partners (annotated by Acting-Man/com's Pater Tenebrarum),

Who’s Anti-American?

Maryland!
The Old Line bugle, fife, and drum,
Maryland!
She is not dead, nor deaf, nor dumb.
Huzza! She spurns the Northern scum!
She breathes! She burns! She’ll come! She’ll come!
Maryland! My Maryland!

– Maryland’s State Song

 

J’accuse…

Guilty as Charged

Yesterday, one dear reader wrote in to say we were “cynical” and “anti-American.”

Today, we rise to defend our reputation… such as it is. Cynical? Nah… We’d need a big dose of positive thinking and earnest optimism to be cynical. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, people who are cynical are “suspicious,” “doubting,” and “skeptical.”

We’re way beyond that. We’re pretty sure that the system is rigged… and rotten. Elections are exercises in solemn deceit. And the Fed’s management of the economy is a mixture of delusion and self-serving scam. We don’t have much doubt about it. That’s just the way it is.

As for “anti-American,” our accuser needs to clarify the allegation. Is he talking about the Deep State? The empire? Or is he talking about the 50 sovereign states… and the Old Republic? Or the language? The culture? Reality TV… the Kardashians… NASCAR racing… Old Faithful and the mighty Mississip’?

No one can be anti-America; America is too many things to too many people. But if he’s talking about the federales who control half our national output… tie us in knots with Obamacare, National Labor Relations Board rules, and all their other dopey programs… and stomp around the world trying to justify their trillion-dollars-a-year security budget…

…if he’s talking about Hillary, Bernie, The Donald, the Bushes, et al… and all the 535 members of the U.S. Congress… and the 2,783,000 zombies on the U.S. payroll…

…if he’s talking about the connivers who pump out phony credit… stifle real savings… sabotage real wealth creation… and shift trillions of dollars from the people who earned it to the cronies favored by the Establishment…

If he’s talking about THAT America, he’s right. We’re agin’ it. Guilty as charged. And we’re not alone. Apparently, about half the country is “anti-American.” Here’s our friend and Black Swan author Nassim Nicholas Taleb explaining The Donald phenomenon:

The “establishment” composed of journos, BS-vending talking heads with well-formulated verbs, bureaucrato-cronies, lobbyists in training, New Yorker-reading semi-intellectuals, image-conscious empty suits, Washington rent seekers and other “well-thinking” members of the vocal elites are not getting the point about what is happening and the sterility of their arguments. People are not voting for Trump (or Sanders). People are just voting, finally, to destroy the establishment.

 

Nassim Taleb explains the Donald and the Bern – and he’s right.

 

The Failure of NIRP

Yesterday, stocks took a little rest. The Dow went approximately nowhere. At first glance, things don’t look bad. U.S. crude oil is back over $40 a barrel. And U.S. stocks are back in the black for the year.

But China is on a debt binge that is bound to end in a blowup. And U.S. corporate earnings are falling, leaving only borrowing and share buybacks to hold up prices.

Frackers are still operating at a loss. Auto and student debt are going into default. Global trade – as measured by freight indexes – is still sinking.

And Japan – the pacesetter in the race to the bottom – is proving that negative interest rates have an effect exactly opposite to what the meddlers intended. NIRP (negative-interest-rate policy) is supposed to spur lending and spending. In Japan, it has done neither – the yen is strengthening as the economy weakens.

 

Total NIRP fail in Nippon – click to enlarge.

 

NIRP was always an “experimental” policy. Central banks in Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, the euro zone, and Japan have all pushed their target lending rates into negative territory. All that has been learned so far (apart from that this doesn’t work) is that sales of home safes go up, as people take out cash and keep it at home.

Negative interest rates amount to a tax on savings. You pay to save instead of being paid to save. Whether the people hoarding cash are worried about the prospect of paying a negative interest rate tax on their bank deposits, or anticipating some more awful crisis…we don’t know.

More to come on QE and negative rates and why they really are old-fashioned “money printing” after all –  tomorrow. For now, let us return to the “anti-American” allegation.

 

Anti-American… in Maryland

We’re fond of the place we grew up – the Maryland Tidewater. At least, we are fond of it as it was when we grew up in it. But it has changed. Last week, the Maryland State Senate voted to change the words of the state song, bringing it more in line with the spirit of the Empire.

 

Sheet music of the old song – the one that still said “northern scum”. Huzzah!

 

The song recalls the period – in the early 1860s – in which Maryland was attacked… by the United States of America. “Northern scum,” is how our state song describes its historic enemies. Maryland was a “border” state, not sure how it felt about the secession movement.

Then the Yankees invaded, cutting off civilized discussion on the matter. They arrested Baltimore’s mayor, the city council, the police commissioner, and the entire board of police. All were held without charges. Habeas corpus was suspended.

Then when the Supreme Court ruled that the feds had no power to ignore constitutional protections, Abe Lincoln simply ignored the Supreme Court. He continued to hold his prisoners in the “American Bastille” – Fort McHenry. One of the prisoners – held without charges – was the grandson of Francis Scott Key, who had written the American national anthem.

 

Francis Scott Key – his grandson found out who the “real Lincoln” was.

 

He must have seen the black humor of his situation. In 1814, during Britain’s attack on Fort McHenry, his grandfather had wondered whether the flag still flew “o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

In 1861, Lincoln gave the answer: No.

 

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1UhMIgh Tyler Durden