from mcclatchy: A year ago the headline was "It's hot, hot, hot on the summer solstice." This year the solstice weather is much more confused. You have drought in Mississippi, snow in the Rocky Mountains, the mid-Atlantic sits under blanket of heat and humidity, and in the Pacific Northwest, cold and wet. In Kentucky you had a flood that left one 4-year-old asking, "Daddy are we going to die today?" A round-up of weather solstice stories from McClatchy:
flashback: 'vibrant response': US nuke scenario & northcom from army news service: Consequence-management response forces, or CCMRF, are staging a training exercise beginning July 31 to prepare for potential domestic disasters capable of injuring or killing several thousand civilians.
The "Vibrant Response" exercise will be conducted by the Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear and High-Yield Explosive, or CBRNE Joint Response Force, through Aug. 14.
"It's going to be extremely complex and require a tremendous amount of coordination with other agencies and locals at various levels," said Maj. Gen. John Basilica, commander of Operational Command Post 1, U.S. Army North. "It is all designed to test and challenge the headquarters and command in control elements to make sure they can work together to respond quickly, because speed is the most important piece of this."
The service members will be given a situation in which they will be testing communication capabilities and reactions. Participants will be role-playing as certain pubic figures, like mayor and governor, in one scenario.
CBRNE is made of three divisions, 9.1, 10.1 and 10.2; 10.1 and 10.2 are being trained to be combat-ready by Oct. 1. Basilica heads up the 10.2 task force, which consists of reserve-component units.
The exercise will involve about 400 to 500 people at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. The two divisions will each train one week, in succession with one another. Each CCMRF unit contains three task forces - medical, operations and aviation, in addition to smaller elements with specific technical expertise. The Operation Task Force 2/18 MEB from South Carolina, Medical Task Force 3/30 MEB from Illinois, and Aviation Task Force 11 from Kentucky will all participate in the exercise.
"We don't get that many opportunities to provide these specific headquarters together and train in a command-post type exercise," Basilica said.
The CBRNE was transferred to U.S. Northern Command's Joint Task Force Civil Support in October 2002. JTF-CS provides support from active, Guard and Reserve members, and civilians, who are all commanded by a National Guard general officer.
CBRNE is designed to work with federal agencies like the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Center for Disease Control, to aid, restore and prevent casualties in instances of major disaster.
The CCRMF is only used after all local, state and federal resources have been exhausted, Basilica and Collins said.
"We hope to God that there are no terrorist attacks or no major industrial accident in the U.S. where the city, state or federal government might ask for additional capabilities. We hope that does not happen, but if it does, I think it's a great story for the nation that you have these multiple CCMRF forces that would be trained and ready to step in and assist the states if they ask for extra help," Collins said.
banks in georgia, north carolina & kansas closed by regulators from bloomberg: Banks in North Carolina, Georgia and Kansas with combined assets of $1.5 billion were seized by regulators last week, costing the U.S. insurance fund $363 million and pushing this year’s tally of failures to 40. Southern Community Bank of Fayetteville, Georgia, and 111- year-old Cooperative Bank in Wilmington, North Carolina, were closed June 19 by state officials, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency shut First National Bank of Anthony, Kansas. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. was named receiver.
unemployment at highest level in 25yrs from washington times: The turmoil ravaging General Motors and Chrysler generated big jumps in joblessness last month throughout the Midwest, sending Michigan's unemployment rate above 14 percent and pushing three nearby states into double digits. Jobless rates in Illinois and Indiana surpassed 10 percent, while Ohio's approached 11 percent, according to data released Friday in a Labor Department report. The half-percentage-point jump in the national unemployment rate rippled throughout the country as 48 states and the District of Columbia reported increases in their jobless rates in May. The U.S. unemployment rate rose from 8.9 percent in April to 9.4 percent in May, its highest level in more than a quarter-century. The rate was 10.8 percent near the end of 1982.
cia recruiting laid-off bankers in nyc from newsmax: Laid off from Wall Street? The CIA wants you -- as long as you can pass a lie detector test and show that you are motivated by service to your country rather than your wallet. The Central Intelligence Agency has been advertising for recruits and will be holding interviews on June 22 at a secret location in New York. "Economics, finance and business professionals, if the quest for the bottom line is just not enough for you, the Central Intelligence Agency has a mission like no other," one radio advertisement for the agency says. "Join CIA's directorate of intelligence and be a part of our global mission as an economic or financial analyst. Make a difference in your career and for your nation," it says.
financial dictatorship spreads to europe from steve watson: The European Union is set to mirror moves in the US to overhaul the economic regulatory oversight system, in a move that will see national regulators superceded by European supervisors. “The proposals involve creating three pan-European watchdogs next year to ensure countries introduce new rules on supervision.” Reports the London Telegraph. “Under the proposals, there is to be a European Banking Authority in London, an Insurance Authority in Frankfurt, and a Securities Authority in Paris. All European leaders agreed today to their creation.” These three new bodies will have the authority to dictate and implement decisions on regulatory standards across the board in every member state. Furthermore, the deal will see the creation of a European Systemic Risk Board, that would “monitor the build up of risks”, issue recommendations for action and oversee their implementation. The chairmanship of this new body will be elected by members of the general council of the European Central Bank. This mirrors plans in the US to hand the private Federal Reserve powers to simply seize and take over any company it defines as a risk to the economy. Of course, we shouldn’t be surprised by the move given that, for the most part, the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank are run by the same private globalist banking corporations.
bankster 'holiday' planned for september? from kurt nimmo: Bob Chapman’s influential International Forecaster is reporting on the possibility of a so-called “bank holiday” planned for late August or early September. According to Chapman’s sources, U.S. embassies around the world are selling dollars and stockpiling money from respective countries where they operate. “Some US embassies worldwide are being advised to purchase massive amounts of local currencies,” writes Harry Schultz, “enough to last them a year.” Schultz publishes the Harry Schultz Letter, an international investment, financial, economic, and geopolitical newsletter named as “Newsletter of the Year” by Peter Brimelow of Market Watch in 2005 and 2008. Schultz believes the global elite are in the process of engineering an FDR-style “bank holiday” of undetermined length in order to “sort-out the bank mess” and impose new bank rules. On March 5, 1933, in the depths of the banker engineered “Great Depression,” newly elected Franklin Roosevelt declared a “bank holiday” that forced banks closed for four days. Roosevelt then rammed the Emergency Banking Act through the legislature. Passed by Congress on March 9, the act granted FDR near dictatorial control over the dealings of banks. It also allowed the Secretary of the Treasury the power to compel every person and business in the country to relinquish their gold and accept paper currency in exchange.
numbers on welfare see sharp increase from wsj: Welfare rolls, which were slow to rise and actually fell in many states early in the recession, now are climbing across the country for the first time since President Bill Clinton signed legislation pledging "to end welfare as we know it" more than a decade ago. Twenty-three of the 30 largest states, which account for more than 88% of the nation's total population, see welfare caseloads above year-ago levels, according to a survey conducted by The Wall Street Journal and the National Conference of State Legislatures. As more people run out of unemployment compensation, many are turning to welfare as a stopgap. The biggest increases are in states with some of the worst jobless rates. Oregon's count was up 27% in May from a year earlier; South Carolina's climbed 23% and California's 10% between March 2009 and March 2008.
condo dwellers finding empty buildings from miami herald: Joshua Hamann jokingly compares himself to the last human in a city overrun by zombies. He's not suggesting his neighbors are zombies. The problem is, he has no neighbors. Hamann dwells in a newly opened condo. And in the six weeks since moving into the gleaming new Everglades on the Bay in downtown Miami, he has felt pretty lonely. Hamann occupies one of only about 50 sold condos in his 49-story tower, out of 409 units. A couple miles north at Midtown Miami, Alisha Marks knows the same feeling. "It was pretty much a ghost town when I got here," she says.
... pay extra attention in oregon as these exercises coincide w/ the fictional 'operation blackjack' explosion in portland on jun22 ... from northcom: North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command are planning to conduct a combined exercise June 18 - 24 that will incorporate several military exercises with a National Guard exercise. These linked exercises are referred to as ARDENT SENTRY 09. Events will take place in multiple venues across the country including Iowa, Kansas, Oregon, Wyoming, and off the East and West Coasts.
The exercise will allow several Department of Defense organizations and some federal and state partners to implement plans and respond to a variety of notional events. Historically, exercises like these have helped both DoD and other agencies review their processes and procedures and focus their future training efforts on closing gaps and identifying areas that need additional attention.
The activities in the vicinity of Camp Rilea will involve the deployment of an Army National Guard ground-based air defense system that will be integrated with Air Force airborne systems (AWACS and fighters) and a Navy Aegis Destroyer. (Media interested in covering this event should contact Mr. Al Eakle at 1-850-283-8080)
In Wyoming, Air Force Space Command will respond to an incident involving a simulated nuclear weapon. (Media interested in covering this should contact Capt. Sharbe Clark at 719-554-3815).
again, as i have stated many times before: when obama gets into office, we'll switch back to the days of waco's, mcveigh's & the false left/right paradigm of abortion, gay marriage & guns...
obama puts spotlight on murder of abortion doctor from dpa: US President Barack Obama condemned the murder of an abortion doctor who was shot down inside a Wichita, Kansas, church early Sunday, throwing the national spotlight on the decades-old bitter struggle over the issue... Obama, a centre-left Democrat who supports access to legal abortion, took the unusual step of commenting on the killing. Earlier this month, he signaled his willingness to grapple with the issue in a graduation speech at a Catholic university and appealed for both sides to work together to help women facing unplanned pregnancies. Obama said he was 'shocked and outraged' by Tiller's murder. 'However profound our differences as Americans over difficult issues such as abortion, they cannot be resolved by heinous acts of violence,' the president said in a statement.
memo tells kansas juvenile jails to prep for 10-day quarantine from ap: Authorities in charge of the youth inmates in Kansas have geared up for the possibility of a swine flu outbreak at juvenile correctional facilities. The Juvenile Justice Authority issued a memo Tuesday to all staff outlining plans to monitor the spread of swine flu and minimize exposure. The memo comes on the heels of staff concerns over two earlier unauthorized memos issued at the correctional facilities in Beloit and Larned requesting staff to start making personal plans in the unlikely event of a quarantine. Officials said the state's three juvenile justice facilities are screening visitors for flu symptoms. The state also suspended a requirement that community case managers conduct face-to-face contact with youths and increased medical screening of young people brought to a facility.
from infowars: It does not matter that al-Qaeda is not a threat to the homeland — you need to prepare for a terrorist attack regardless, according to PrepareMetro KC, a website put together by the Greater Kansas City region’s Metropolitan Emergency Managers Committee, which is funded by the Department of Homeland Security.
"Terrorist operations begin with extensive planning,” warns the federally funded website. “You can help prevent and detect terrorism - and other types of crime - by watching out for suspicious activities and reporting them to the proper authorities."
obama picks bilderberger sebelius for health secretary from infowars: Obama has picked a Bilderberger to be his choice for health secretary — Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius. Obama initially picked former Senate Democrat leader Tom Daschle for the position, but Daschle “withdrew because of personal tax issues,” in other words he didn’t bother to pay any taxes because minions of the elite are not required to do so, except for public relations reasons. Recall Sebelius, described as “a moderate Democrat,” was considered a leading candidate to be Obama’s vice presidential running mate last summer, but the elite picked CFR member Joe Biden instead. In June, 2008, Sebelius attended the 2008 Bilderberg meeting in Chantilly, Virginia, a fact not reported by the corporate media in her home state. She was included on the Official 2008 Bilderberg Participant List.
brzezinski's fear: class warfare & destruction of the new world order from kurt nimmo: Making an appearance on the Morning Joe television show, the Rockefeller globalist Zbigniew Brzezinski said it is high time the rich who have made billions since the days of the Clinton administration help out the poor and struggling masses. Said Brzezinski: "Where is the monied class today? Why aren’t they doing something: the people who made billions, millions. I’m sort of thinking of Paulson, of Rubin. Why don’t they get together, and why don’t they organize a National Solidarity Fund in which they call on all of those who made these extraordinary amounts of money to kick some back in to [a] National Solidarity Fund?"
Brzezinski almost looked grandfatherly as he said this (see video). He almost came off as a good-natured humanitarian… almost. It all sounded good, if implausible — that is until Brzezinski reached the end of his carefully crafted diatribe: "And if we don’t get some sort of voluntary National Solidarity Fund, at some point there’ll be such political pressure that Congress will start getting in the act, there’s going to be growing conflict between the classes and if people are unemployed and really hurting, hell, there could be even riots."
In other words, Brzezinski is afraid that if some filthy lucre is not dispensed among the unwashed, they will rise up and burn down the banks, sack the corporations, and destroy the globalist edifice so painfully erected over the last fifty or so years — and maybe even go so far as to string up Brzezinski and his fellow globalists from trees and overpasses, the sort of dirty and regrettable business that invariably occurs in the process of violent revolutions in response to decades of provocation.
rahm’s ethics & tax problem from nypost: News broke last week that Rahm Emanuel, now White House chief of staff, lived rent-free for years in the home of Rep. Rosa De Lauro (D-Conn.) - and failed to disclose the gift, as congressional ethics rules mandate. But this is only the tip of Emanuel's previously undislosed ethics problems. One issue is the work Emanuel tossed the way of De Lauro's husband. But the bigger one goes back to Emanuel's days on the board of now-bankrupt mortgage giant Freddie Mac. Emanuel is a multimillionaire, but lived for the last five years for free in the tony Capitol Hill townhouse owned by De Lauro and her husband, Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg... Now Rahm Emanuel is in the White House helping President Obama dig out of the mess that Freddie Mac helped start. The president's chief of staff isn't subject to Senate confirmation, but his ethics still matter. Is this the change that we can depend on?
dr ezekiel emanuel, rahm's brother, tapped for health care policy advisor spot from chicago sun-times: While the Obama White House is searching for a replacement for health czar Tom Daschle, policy work on health care reform--a priority for the administration--Is ongoing with one key advisor especially well connected. The brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a noted bioethicist, is advising the Obama administration on health care reform. Dr. Emanuel is the Chair of the Department of Bioethics at The Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health and a breast oncologist.
obama prescreens reporters at press conference from wsj: About half-way through President Obama's press conference Monday night, he had an unscripted question of his own. "All, Chuck Todd," the President said, referring to NBC's White House correspondent. "Where's Chuck?" He had the same strange question about Fox News's Major Garrett: "Where's Major?" The problem wasn't the lighting in the East Room. The President was running down a list of reporters preselected to ask questions. The White House had decided in advance who would be allowed to question the President and who was left out. Presidents are free to conduct press conferences however they like, but the decision to preselect questioners is an odd one, especially for a White House famously pledged to openness. We doubt that President Bush, who was notorious for being parsimonious with follow-ups, would have gotten away with prescreening his interlocutors. Mr. Obama can more than handle his own, so our guess is that this is an attempt to discipline reporters who aren't White House favorites. Few accounts of Monday night's event even mentioned the curious fact that the White House had picked its speakers in advance. We hope that omission wasn't out of fear of being left off the list the next time.
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from mcclatchy: A year ago the headline was "It's hot, hot, hot on the summer solstice." This year the solstice weather is much more confused. You have drought in Mississippi, snow in the Rocky Mountains, the mid-Atlantic sits under blanket of heat and humidity, and in the Pacific Northwest, cold and wet. In Kentucky you had a flood that left one 4-year-old asking, "Daddy are we going to die today?" A round-up of weather solstice stories from McClatchy:
