admin – Page 26247

Trump Goes Off on Loser Pope Who Called Him Un-Christian

Pope Francis had harsh words for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Thursday: “A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian,” said the Pope. He later hedged his criticism by adding that he wasn’t sure if Trump had actually expressed such un-Christian sentiments.

Trump didn’t appreciate the remark. (I mean, who cares what some loser pope thinks? The Vatican doesn’t even make good deals anymore, let me tell you. Sad!) In his response, Trump said that ISIS would certainly try to attack the Vatican, and when that happens, all Catholics should pray that Trump is president.

Here is Trump’s full statement:

If and when the Vatican is attacked by ISIS, which as everyone knows is ISIS’s ultimate trophy, I can promise you that the Pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been President because this would not have happened. ISIS would have been eradicated unlike what is happening now with our all talk, no action politicians.

The Mexican government and its leadership has made many disparaging remarks about me to the Pope, because they want to continue to rip off the United States, both on trade and at the border, and they understand I am totally wise to them. The Pope only heard one side of the story – he didn’t see the crime, the drug trafficking and the negative economic impact the current policies have on the United States. He doesn’t see how Mexican leadership is outsmarting President Obama and our leadership in every aspect of negotiation.

For a religious leader to question a person’s faith is disgraceful. I am proud to be a Christian and as President I will not allow Christianity to be consistently attacked and weakened, unlike what is happening now, with our current President. No leader, especially a religious leader, should have the right to question another man’s religion or faith. They are using the Pope as a pawn and they should be ashamed of themselves for doing so, especially when so many lives are involved and when illegal immigration is so rampant.

Emphasis mine. Nobody has the right to question another person’s faith—not even the leader of that faith—in Trump’s universe. Well, almost nobody. As Trump himself tweeted just one week ago: “How can Ted Cruz be an Evangelical Christian when he lies so much and is so dishonest?”

In summary: the Pope doesn’t get to judge whether people are Christian enough. Trump does.

from Hit & Run http://ift.tt/1PTRXvY
via IFTTT

Remembering Scalia’s Sense of Humor – And When the Court Was WASPy To the Max

Orange County Register columnist Ron Hart recalls a side of Justice Antonin Scalia that is often overlooked: The guy had a sense of humor.

I was fortunate to meet Scalia on a few occasions. Once I brought a parking ticket and asked if he could look into for me. He said he would have, but he had jury duty that day. No one laughed harder and took himself less seriously. Scalia was likable, authentic, approachable, brilliant and intellectually honest.

Hart also notes two other things regarding Scalia.

First:

Scalia, the justice most hated by the Left, was nominated by President Ronald Reagan and confirmed 98-0 by the Senate in 1986. Can you imagine that today?

And second, the Court is no longer WASPy to the extreme:

When Justice John Paul Stevens left the court at age 89 (he was so old they had to keep reminding him to close his robe), we no longer had a Protestant on the Supreme Court. As a minority, we WASPs will soon be getting into Harvard with 950 SAT scores and qualifying for casino licenses.

More here.

The remaining justices are all either Catholic or Jewish, which is not simply a sea change from generations past but a real stumbling block for folks that believe the Court should reflect the theological diversity of the country. About 50 percent of the country is some form of Protestant Christianity, 20 percent Roman Catholic, and 6 percent everything else. Atheists pull about 3 percent and agnostics another 4 percent (totals don’t add up to 100 due to non-responses, says Pew Research).

Even as late as the 1970s, the idea of evangelical protestants and Catholics getting along was a stretch, with fundamentalists opposing figures such as Billy Graham and Jerry Fawell for promiscuous ecumenicism. Many evangelical protestants even held their tongues when Roe v. Wade was issued in 1973. Being anti-abortion was such a bedrock principle of Catholicism, after all, how wrong could it be if you believed protestant theology? As Randall Balmer has written in a must-read story about the “real origins of the Religious Right”:

Although a few evangelical voices, including Christianity Today magazine, mildly criticized the ruling, the overwhelming response was silence, even approval. Baptists, in particular, applauded the decision as an appropriate articulation of the division between church and state, between personal morality and state regulation of individual behavior. “Religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision,” wrote W. Barry Garrett of Baptist Press.

In fact, says Balmer,

It wasn’t until 1979—a full six years after Roe—that evangelical leaders, at the behest of conservative activist Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a rallying-cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term.

It’s also worth noting that in the immediate passage of Roe v. Wade, abortion was also not clearly a liberal/conservative or Democratic/Republican issue. High-profile Republicans such as Barry Goldwater, Nelson Rockefeller, and Bob Packwood were for it. In 1967, Ronald Reagan legalized “therapeutic abortion” in California, saying it “was a subject I’d never given much thought to.” The increase in abortions in California disturbed him and he eventually became firmly anti-abortion, though as Balmer writes, Reagan didn’t always foreground that position, even when talking to evangelicals. Raised a Baptist, Jimmy Carter has always been personally opposed to abortion and has even called for the Democratic Party to become more “pro-life.” As governor of Georgia and later as president, he says he tried to minimize its incidence while respecting the legality of the procedure post-Roe. Balmer argues that one of the reasons Carter fell out of favor with evangelicals was “his refusal to seek a constitutional amendment outlawing it. That failure “was viewed by politically conservative evangelicals as an unpardonable sin.”

Over the past 30 or 40 years, the biggest shift in terms of religion in American life is that the new divide is not among followers of different faiths; it’s between religious people and non-religious or secular types. In an American political context—and certainly when it comes to the Supreme Court—that issue reduces down almost completely to abortion and, with the passage of Obamacare’s various mandates, arguments over mandates for birth control coverage (should Catholic orders be forced to offer this against their faith?) and types of birth control (Hobby Lobby objected not to birth control per se but to types its owners considered abortifacients).

Since the Religious Right is now firmly anti-abortion, questions about the specific religious beliefs of justices are secondary at best. Both the right and the left, Republicans and Democrats, know the real question is less about whether the Pope is the vicar of Christ on Earth or a covenant of grace not works. It’s whether abortion is legally permissible.

Related: “What’s The Libertarian Position on Abortion?” Great discussion featuring Reason’s Ron Bailey, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and me, plus The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway. Watch below, more details here.

from Hit & Run http://ift.tt/1QM10il
via IFTTT

Trump Sides with the FBI Against Apple; On Torture Proclaims “Water Boarding Is Fine but Not Tough Enough”

Screen Shot 2016-02-18 at 10.21.03 AM

When Donald Trump was asked about Apple’s decision, Trump did not bring up the complexity of the situation, the constant battle between government and individual, between private and public selves, between technology and law enforcement. He did not commend Apple for trying to stave off government’s incursion into our personal details. He did what Trump does: He came up with the easiest, simplest, basest possible reaction to an endlessly complicated issue, and he ran with it.

On Fox & Friends this morning, Trump said, “To think that Apple won’t allow us to get into her cellphone? Who do they think they are? No, we have to open it.”

– From Bloomberg

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned from the 2016 election season is the obvious fact that the GOP base has absolutely no interest in freedom, civil liberties or the Constitution. The huge success of the megalomaniac statist Donald Trump, as well as the pitiful performance of Rand Paul, has proven this beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Many people will argue this has been obvious for quite some time, but the reason I bring it up is because both Ron Paul and his son Rand believed that the Republican party could serve as a useless albeit unwilling vessel to bring back liberty to these United States. The 2016 GOP primary has proven once and for all that this was pure fantasy.

from Liberty Blitzkrieg http://ift.tt/1QotmPe
via IFTTT

Americans’ Economic Expectations Slump Near 2 Year Lows (And The Stock Ramp Is Not Helping)

Americans have been increasingly disgruntled with the economic outlook since March 2015 and today’s Bloomberg confidence print at 42.5 sends hope back to near 2-year lows. The early year bounce in expectations has been erased as US equity rallies have done nothing to stymie the growing realization across the states that something dismal this way comes.

Aug 2015 and Jan 2016 both show the dramatic and sudden realization of equity market investors crashing down to “real” economic expectations. The last few days have sent stocks soaring once again to re-engage animal spirits… because 3rd time is the charm right?

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

A Cash Ban Has Already Begun…

The Central Banks hate physical cash. So much so they there will likely try to ban it in the near future.

You see, almost all of the “wealth” in the financial system is digital in nature.

1) The total currency (actual cash in the form of bills and coins) in the US financial system is a little over $1.36 trillion.

2) When you include digital money sitting in short-term accounts and long-term accounts then you’re talking about roughly $10 trillion in “money” in the financial system.

3) In contrast, the money in the US stock market (equity shares in publicly traded companies) is over $20 trillion in size.

4) The US bond market (money that has been lent to corporations, municipal Governments, State Governments, and the Federal Government) is almost twice this at $38 trillion.

5) Total Credit Market Instruments (mortgages, collateralized debt obligations, junk bonds, commercial paper and other digitally-based “money” that is based on debt) is even larger $58.7 trillion.

6) Unregulated over the counter derivatives traded between the big banks and corporations is north of $220 trillion.

When looking over these data points, the first thing that jumps out at the viewer is that the vast bulk of “money” in the system is in the form of digital loans or credit (non-physical debt).

Put another way, actual physical money or cash (as in bills or coins you can hold in your hand) comprises less than 1% of the “money” in the financial system.

As far as the Central Banks are concerned, this is a good thing because if investors/depositors were ever to try and convert even a small portion of this “wealth” into actual physical bills, the system would implode (there simply is not enough actual cash).

Remember, the current financial system is based on debt. The benchmark for “risk free” money in this system is not actual cash but US Treasuries.

In this scenario, when the 2008 Crisis hit, one of the biggest problems for the Central Banks was to stop investors from fleeing digital wealth for the comfort of physical cash. Indeed, the actual “thing” that almost caused the financial system to collapse was when depositors attempted to pull $500 billion out of money market funds.

A money market fund takes investors’ cash and plunks it into short-term highly liquid debt and credit securities. These funds are meant to offer investors a return on their cash, while being extremely liquid (meaning investors can pull their money at any time).

This works great in theory… but when $500 billion in money was being pulled (roughly 24% of the entire market) in the span of four weeks, the truth of the financial system was quickly laid bare: that digital money is not in fact safe.

To use a metaphor, when the money market fund and commercial paper markets collapsed, the oil that kept the financial system working dried up. Almost immediately, the gears of the system began to grind to a halt.

When all of this happened, the global Central Banks realized that their worst nightmare could in fact become a reality: that if a significant percentage of investors/ depositors ever tried to convert their “wealth” into cash (particularly physical cash) the whole system would implode.

As a result of this, virtually every monetary action taken by the Fed since this time has been devoted to forcing investors away from cash and into risk assets. The most obvious move was to cut interest rates to 0.25%, rendering the return on cash to almost nothing.

However, in their own ways, the various QE programs and Operation Twist have all had similar aims: to force investors away from cash, particularly physical cash.

After all, if cash returns next to nothing, anyone who doesn’t want to lose their purchasing power is forced to seek higher yields in bonds or stocks.

The Fed’s economic models predicted that by doing this, the US economy would come roaring back. The only problem is that it hasn’t. In fact, by most metrics, the US economy has flat-lined for several years now, despite the Fed having held ZIRP for 5-6 years and engaged in three rounds of QE.

As a result of this… mainstream economists at CitiGroup, the German Council of Economic Experts, and bond managers at M&G have suggested doing away with cash entirely.

If you think this sounds like some kind of conspiracy theory, consider that France just banned any transaction over €1,000 Euros from using physical cash. Spain has already banned transactions over €2,500. Uruguay has banned transactions over $5,000. And on and on.

This will be coming to the US in the near future. Already, the big banks (the ones with the closest ties to the Federal Reserve) have begun turning away deposits OR charging them.

State Street Corp. , the Boston bank that manages assets for institutional investors, for the first time has begun charging some customers for large dollar deposits, people familiar with the matter said. J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., the nation’s largest bank by assets, has cut unwanted deposits by more than $150 billion this year, in part by charging fees…

And here’s another big “tell”…

“At some point you wonder whether there will be a shortage of financial institutions willing to take on these balances,” said Kelli Moll, head of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP’s hedge-fund practice in New York, saying that where to hold cash has become an increasing topic of conversation as hedge funds are shown the door by longtime banking counterparties.

So where is the physical cash meant to go?

Jerome Schneider, head of Pacific Investment Management Co.’s short-term and funding desk, which advises corporate and institutional clients, said that as a result of the bank actions, he and his customers have discussed as cash alternatives boosting investments in U.S. Treasury bonds, ultrashort-duration bond funds and money-market funds.

When it comes to cash, Mr. Schneider said, “Clients have been put on warning.”

Source: Wall Street Journal.

This is just the beginning. Indeed… we've uncovered a secret document outlining how the US Federal Reserve plans to incinerate savings.

We detail this paper and outline three investment strategies you can implement

right now to protect your capital from the Fed's sinister plan in our Special Report

Survive the Fed's War on Cash.

We are making 1,000 copies available for FREE the general public.

To pick up yours, swing by….

http://ift.tt/1eaWvC8

Best Regards

Graham Summers

Chief Market Strategist

Phoenix Capital Research

Our FREE daily e-letter: http://ift.tt/QHtIFM

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1RakKix Phoenix Capital Research

The Decline Of The Coal Industry Is “Long-Term” And “Irreversible”

Submitted by Nick Cunningham via OilPrice.com,

Demand for thermal coal is declining, a trend that appears to be “irreversible.”

That is the conclusion from Goldman Sachs, which published a new report on the global coal and gas trade on February 15, and reported on by SNL. For coal producers, this is the latest in a long line of grim warnings, all of which point to a future of shuttered power plants, mine closures, and bankruptcies.

Last fall, Goldman Sachs made headlines when it predicted that “peak coal” was drawing near. “The industry does not require new investment given the ability of existing assets to satisfy flat demand, so prices will remain under pressure as the deflationary cycle continues,” the investment bank wrote in September 2015.

The reaffirmation of that belief in its latest report will make less of a splash, if only because there is a growing realization that the coal industry is dying. Nevertheless, Goldman offers some new insights about the direction for the industry.

For much of the last decade, with coal consumption flat or declining in most of the industrialized world, there was still a massive lifeline for coal producers. China’s explosive growth led to a seemingly endless appetite for coal, despite bleak and deteriorating air quality in many of its cities. But, after years of blistering growth, China’s coal burning came to a screeching halt, likely hitting a peak in 2013.

With China’s coal market hitting a peak and entering decline, India is supposed to take over as the last vestige of growth. In the IEA’s 2015 World Energy Outlook, it published a lengthy section on India, placing it front and center as the single most important country to watch in terms of its influence on the future of energy markets.

India is supposed to add almost 900 million metric tons of new coal demand by 2040. To put that into context, it is more than twice as much demand as the rest of the world is expected to add combined over that timeframe. Coal demand in the U.S., EU, China, and Japan, to name a few, will fall from here on out.

So coal producers will simply export their coal to India, right? The problem with that plan is that India is set to ramp up its own domestic production of coal, cutting out the need to import more. India used to suffer from a shortage of supply, which led to a costly import bill and even routine blackouts in its electricity sector. But Indian mines are now churning out more coal, and stockpiles are rising. India’s increasing ability to meet its own demand for coal, Goldman Sachs says, will mean “the peak and decline in seaborne trade volumes may arrive earlier than we had previously expected." The bank cut its forecast for thermal coal prices in Newcastle, Australia – a key global benchmark – to just $45 per tonne in 2018, down from $48 per tonne this year.

But the worst news for the industry is this: While oil and natural gas could see prices rebound as demand rises, coal has very little hope of ever seeing a price rebound again. Goldman sees long-term coal prices at $42.50 per tonne. "Unlike most other commodities, thermal coal is unlikely to experience another period of tightness ever again because investment in new coal-fired generation is becoming less common and the implied decline in long-term demand appears to be irreversible," Goldman Sachs’ analysts concluded.

Even India will fail to make up for the shrinking thermal coal market in the rest of the world. In its latest report, Goldman downgraded cut its demand forecast for thermal coal – in September it predicted that by 2019, the world would be burning 2 percent less coal than it did in 2013. Now, it says thermal coal demand will drop by 7 percent.

This is horrific news for coal mining companies. It also ensures that the list of coal companies that have declared bankruptcy – at least several dozen in the last four years – will continue to grow.

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

Crude Extends Losses As Saudi Minister Says “Will Not Cut Oil Production” To Support Prices

While there was never any expectation of a production “cut” from Saudi Arabia, hope still remained that “discussions of a ‘freeze'” could be extrapolated to an ‘in-the-end’ cut down the line… That is over…

AFP has just reported that…

#BREAKING AFP EXCLUSIVE: Saudi will not cut oil production: FM

— AFP news agency (@AFP) February 18, 2016

“Saudi Arabia isn’t ready to cut its production” of oil to support prices, which have been hurt by a supply glut, AFP reports citing interview with Foreign Affairs Minister Adel al-Jubeir.

Oil prices to be “determined by supply and demand and by market forces”

And Crude is extending its losses…

Of course this is just more noise as there was never any real news regarding expectations of a cut from The Kingdom and along with Iran and Iraq refusing to join discussions of a production cut, the rally of the last week seems on fragile ground.

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

Ted Cruz Says Apple Needs to Comply With the Court Order on Encrpytion, It’s All Constitutional

Ted Cruz said he believed Apple should comply with a court order forcing the private company to assist the FBI and develop software that would permit the agency to bypass the security measures on an iPhone that was used by one of the San Bernardino shooters. He appeared last night at a South Carolina town hall hosted by CNN and moderated by Anderson Cooper.

Cruz said Apple had a binding search order that it should follow. Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, has resisted the government, arguing in an open letter to customers yesterday that the order had “implications far beyond the legal case at hand” and that any software Apple created to bypass the encryption on the San Bernardino iPhone could be used on any iPhone of the same model.

Cruz disagreed, insisting while Apple had a “serious argument that they should not be forced to put a backdoor in every cellphone everyone has,” law enforcement had the better argument. The FBI, Cruz insisted, got a search order, which was “consistent with the Fourth Amendment.” Apple, Cruz claimed, was being told to “open this phone, not Anderson’s phone, not everyone’s here, open this phone.”

Cruz didn’t mention that the iPhone of the attacker belonged the county health department, because the attacker was a government health inspector. A discussion about whether local (and larger) governments should be handing out phones to their employees that they can’t access when necessary seems a lot more appropriate in this instance than one about whether the government should get a way in to everyone’s phones.

In his letter, Cook had already rejected arguments that “building a backdoor for just one iPhone is a simple, clean-cut solution.” That, Cook explained, ignored “both the basics of digital security and the significance of what the government is demanding in this case.” He compared the software Apple was being ordered to develop to a master key that was “capable of opening hundreds of millions of locks.”

While Cruz insisted Apple should comply with the order forthwith, Apple also has the right to appeal, which it has said it would be doing. Cruz insisted last night that the government order, and the abrogation of the right to the security of our personal papers and effects from government access that came with it, was consistent with the Fourth Amendment. But the case could go all the way to the Supreme Court.

In other portions of the town hall, Cruz argued he was a “constitutionalist” who would appoint the best (conservative) justices. His answer on Apple doesn’t bode well for the Fourth Amendment. It was much easier for Cruz to call the judicial order for Kim Davis, a Kentucky clerk, to perform the duties required of her, “lawless” because of the perceived abrogation of her rights in that instance.

Apple’s argument, however, may not be as clear as it sounds either. Shane Harris at The Daily Beast reports that Apple has unlocked phones for authorities on at least 70 occasions in the last eight years. The feds, Harris reported, had also admitted to having developed a method to get through the encryption of one version of the iPhone iOS. That appears to undercut the government’s use of the All Writs Act of 1789, which requires such an order as Apple received to be a last resort for method.

Harris also brought up a New York case involving a meth dealer’s iPhone that Apple is also resisting. There, Apple is arguing, among other things, that the “reputational harm” caused by breaking into the phone for the government “could have a longer term economic impact beyond the mere cost of performing the single extraction at issue.” Apple didn’t start positioning itself as a guardian of privacy, Harris noted, until Edward Snowden’s disclosures about the scale of the government’s Internet surveillance activities.

Customers want their data to be secure, and will seek out service providers that can offer that. Ted Cruz acknowledged that an encryption backdoor is a legitimate concern because of hackers and cyber criminals that could try to break into people’s phones. But people are also concerned about the government doing so, hence the reputational pressure felt by Apple.

Government does not face such reputational pressures, and given Ted Cruz’s uncanny ability to occupy every side of a position at the moment that side is the politically opportune one and his rise in the polls, maybe neither does he.

from Hit & Run http://ift.tt/1RaivLY
via IFTTT

NBC Says Cruz In GOP Lead 48 Hours After Saying Trump Up By 20 Points

In the simplest possible terms, NBC seems to be suffering from a rather acute bout of schizophrenia when it comes to assessing the race for the GOP nomination.

If was just 2 days ago that NBC, in conjunction with Survey Monkey, released the results of a national poll which showed that Donald Trump was a 20 point national favorite among registered Republicans going into the South Carolina primary.

The same poll showed Trump holding a commanding 9 point lead in the race to secure the white evangelical vote.

Either there’s been a dramatic change in voter sentiment in the past 48 hours or we just learned that polls – and perhaps NBC polls especially – are completely worthless, because NBC now says Ted Cruz has a 2 point lead over the brazen billionaire.

“Support for Donald Trump among Republicans has declined in the past month, leaving him slightly behind Sen. Ted Cruz in the GOP presidential race,” WSJ – which co-sponsored the poll – writes, adding that “Mr. Trump had enjoyed a double-digit lead over his rivals, but the new poll found support for him falling by seven percentage points since mid-January.”

As you can see from the graphic shown above, once the field narrows to two candidates, Marco Rubio is the overwhelming favorite to win the nomination and Trump finishes a distant fourth.

WSJ and NBC readily admit that their results are completley at odds with virtually every other poll anyone has conducted heading into Super Tuesday.

“The new survey marks the first time since the fall that the Journal/NBC News poll has found anyone other than Mr. Trump in the lead among Republicans nationally, and it differs from other recent national surveys that show him holding a steady lead,” WSJ goes on to say. “For example, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll, also released Wednesday, shows Mr. Trump with a lead of more than 20 points nationally. That means the Journal/NBC survey could reflect a shift in mood, a temporary blip or a finding outside the mainstream.”

So basically, WSJ and NBC have no idea what the results mean.

“When you see a number this different, it means you might be right on top of a shift in the campaign,” Bill McInturff, a GOP pollster who conducted the survey with Democratic pollster Fred Yang said.

Right. Or it could mean you have no idea what you’re talking about.

NBC/WJS working the ‘poll’ like a bad stripper – geesh http://pic.twitter.com/OeECnLP9Zz

— DanRiehl (@DanRiehl) February 18, 2016

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1KsnYP2 Tyler Durden

Oil Plunges After DOE Reports Across-The-Board Inventory Builds

The exuberance following last night's surprising inventory draw from API has been erased as DOE reports inventory builds across the entire energy complex – crude +2.15mm, distillates +1.4mm, gasoline +3.04mm, and Cushing +36k. WTI Crude has dropped back below $31, erasing API-driven overnight gains.

API reported: