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New Polls Shows 73 Percent Of Americans Distrust The Government
A new poll shows that 73 percent of Americans distrust the decisions made by the federal government – a number that has been steadily increasing throughout the last two administrations.
At its highest point, which occurred during President Obama’s first term, 80 percent of Americans lacked faith in the federal government. While former President George W. Bush fared slightly better, his administration witnessed a steady decline in trust that began in 2002, according to the new data from the Pew Research Center.
The data, which was collected from a survey conducted in January, shows that all demographics and political groups have seen a rise in government distrust.
“However, there are disparities. More than twice as many Hispanics as whites (44 percent vs. 20 percent) trust the federal government, and more blacks (38 percent) than whites trust the government,” Pew Research writes about the data.
Those with a higher rate of government distrust include older Americans, independents and Republicans.
Distrust in the federal government has seen its highest numbers in the past decade. During former President Bill Clinton’s two terms in office, Americans increasingly had a favorable view of the US government. Right before Clinton left office, nearly 60 percent of Americans trusted the US government, while only 40 percent had lost faith. Trust was also particularly high, nearing 80 percent, during former President John F. Kennedy’s term.
But not only has trust in the federal government steadily declined since Obama took office, but public perception has also gone down, particularly among Democrats. Only 33 percent of Americans have a positive opinion of the federal government and 69 percent said that Washington should only conduct operations that can’t be handled by individual states.
“Since Barack Obama’s first year in office, public assessments of the federal government dropped nine points,” Pew’s press release stated, citing findings from a survey conducted in April of 2012. “Most of the change was among Democrats and independents, as the level of favorable views of government among Republicans was already low.”
Pew Research found that the highest favorability ratings were of local governments that were closest to Americans’ homes. More than 60 percent of Americans said they had a favorable view toward their local government, with 52 percent having faith in their state government.
But over the past decade, favorability ratings of federal, state and local governments have all been on the decline, during both the Bush and Obama administrations.
Article By: RT
Obama’s 53 Percent Approval Rating Does Massive Drop To 43 Percent
By JENNIFER EPSTEIN | Politico | 3/12/13 1:48 PM EDT
President Obama’s outreach to members of Congress on both sides of the aisle comes as his approval ratings have begun to drop in public polls.
The latest is the McClatchy-Marist poll released Tuesday, which reports an approval rating of 45 percent for the president among registered voters. That’s the lowest it’s been in the poll since late 2011. His disapproval rating, meanwhile, has inched up to 48 percent, four points higher than it was in December.
His ratings have slipped among independents, with 37 percent approving and 55 percent disapproving. In December, 46 percent of independents approved of Obama’s job performance while 44 percent disapproved.
But it’s still Republicans who are taking more of the blame for letting sequestration take effect. The McClatchy-Marist poll finds 46 percent of those surveyed blaming Republicans, while 36 percent blame the president. Another 12 percent say both sides are to blame.
Obama’s approval rating has been inching downward in Gallup’s daily tracking poll, from hovering above 50 percent to just below that threshhold in the past few days.
His approval rating clocked in at 45 percent in a Quinnipiac poll released earlier this month, down from 53 percent a few weeks after voters reelected him.
Source: Politico
Militia Groups Reaches All Time High In US
Efforts to limit gun violence and to bring about immigration reform have led to a growing backlash from the extreme right, including the so-called patriot and militia groups, a civil rights group said Tuesday.
In its latest report, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extreme right-wing and hate groups, said that it had counted 1,360 patriot groups in 2012, up about 7 percent from the 1,274 active in 2011. But that is also a rise of 813 percent since 2008, the year Barack Obama was elected the nation’s first African-American president.
The groups include 321 militias, far more than the movement’s previous peak in the 1990s, when militias were inflamed by the 1993 Brady Bill to control guns and the 1994 assault rifle ban, the center said.
Picking up speed
“Now, in the wake of the mass murder of 26 children and adults at a Connecticut school and the Obama-led gun control efforts that followed, it seems likely that that growth will pick up speed once again,” the center noted.
The report also cites the election of Obama, efforts to grant more than 11 million undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship, and a troubled economy as contributing factors in the growth of the far-right groups.
“We are seeing a real and rising threat of domestic terrorism as the number of far-right anti-government groups continues to grow at an astounding pace,” said Mark Potok, Southern Poverty Law Center senior fellow and author of the report. “It is critically important that the country take this threat seriously. The potential for deadly violence is real, and clearly rising.”
Constant vigil
Founded in 1971, the center has been the leading watchdog of the extreme right ever since, monitoring a diverse collection of groups that includes neo-Nazis, White nationalists, Black separatists, Holocaust deniers and the patriot and militia movement.
In general, the patriot and militia enthusiasts believe that the U.S. government is seeking to disarm them as a first step to destroying personal liberty and then turning the country over to foreigners seeking world domination.
From 149 organizations in 2008, the number of patriot groups shot up to 512 in 2009, jumped again to 824 in 2010, and then skyrocketed to 1,274 in 2011 before hitting an all-time high last year, the center said.
First inkling
For many Americans, the first inkling of the militia movement came in the August 1992 standoff at Ruby Ridge in Idaho, where three were killed, including a U.S. marshal, in a dispute that involved an illegal-weapons charge.
By February 1993, the U.S. government found itself in another battle over illegal weapons, this time in Waco, Texas, against a group known as the Branch Davidians. In an initial confrontation, four agents and six members of the group were killed in a shootout. On April 19, the government attacked the compound, which caught fire, killing 76 more members of the group.
Citing Ruby Ridge and Waco, Timothy McVeigh, a militia movement member, launched a homemade truck bomb attack on the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995. At least 168 people died and 680 were injured in the attack. McVeigh was convicted and executed.
In a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, the center warned of the potential for current domestic terrorism and urged the creation of a new interagency task force to assess the adequacy of federal resources devoted to the threat.
‘Ominous threats’
“As in the period before the Oklahoma City bombing, we now are seeing ominous threats from those who believe that the government is poised to take their guns,” wrote Richard Cohen, the center’s president and a member of the Department of Homeland Security’s Countering Violent Extremism Working Group.
In October 1994, the center wrote to then-Attorney General Janet Reno about the growing threat of domestic extremism; the Oklahoma City federal building was bombed six months later in the country’s deadliest act of domestic terrorism, the center said.
In the wake of a series of gun attacks in recent years, the government has moved to toughen its gun laws on both the state and federal levels.
Some states, such as New York, have already passed tougher laws and the issue is being debated in Congress. Some are seeking a new assault weapons ban and there is support for universal background checks.
The effort was renewed in the wake of the attack by a lone gunman on a Connecticut elementary school last year where 20 children and six adults were killed before the gunman committed suicide.
Potok said the December school shooting and subsequent gun control debate created a “white-hot rage” among extremist groups and a political climate “very reminiscent” of the period leading up to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
BY MICHAEL MUSKAL
LOS ANGELES TIMES / MCT
Fed Injects Record $100 Billion Cash Into Foreign Banks Operating In The US In Past Week
Source: Zero Hedge
Those who have been following our exclusive series of the Fed’s direct bailout of European banks (here, here, here and here), and, indirectly of Europe, will not be surprised at all to learn that in the week ended February 27, or the week in which Europe went into a however brief tailspin following the shocking defeat of Bersani in the Italian elections, and an even more shocking victory by Berlusconi and Grillo, leading to a political vacuum and a hung parliament, the Fed injected a record $99 billion of excess reserves into foreign banks. As the most recent H.8 statement makes very clear, soared from $836 billion to a near-record $936 billion, or a $99.3 billion reserve “reallocation” in the form of cash – very, very fungible cash – into foreign (read European) banks in one week.
Furthermore, as we first showed, virtually all the “reserves” created by the Fed end up allocated as cash at commercial banks operating in the US: both domestically-chartered (small and large), but more importantly, foreign. And of the $1.884 trillion in very fungible cash parked in various domestic and international US banks, just half of it, or $949 billion is actually allocated to US banks. The other half, or $936 billion, is parked within, again, very fungible cash accounts of foreign (read European) banks operating in the US. This is shown in the chart below (green area is cash of foreign banks), and what is also shown is the total change in the Fed’s excess reserves, which proves, once more, that the Fed continues to fund European banks with hundreds of billions in cash on a week by week basis. And what is perhaps most important, is that of the $250 billion in new reserves created under QEternity, all of it has gone to foreign (read European) banks.
It may anger American to learn that by the time the Fed is done with QEternity (if ever), all of the newly created cash will have gone to mostly European banks. Because with every passing week, whatever new reserves are created by the Fed in exchange for monetizing the US deficit, end up as cash solely at European banks: a sad reality we have seen non-stop since the advent of QE2 when US bank cash balances remained relatively flat in the ~$800 billion range, and every incremental dollar went straight to Europe.
As a reminder, we don’t know how, via assorted shadow banking and other repo pathways, these banks manage to use said cash in other fungible activities. Recall that as we said, “So whether European banks will continue buying the EURUSD, or redirect their Fed-cash into purchasing the ES outright, or invest in other even riskier assets, remains unknown.” It is also unknown is the Fed’s reserves, reappearing as cash, and then siphoned over to European bank HoldCo via payables, is then used by, say, Italian and Spanish banks to purchase BTPs and Bonos, and give the impression that all is well. Because unlike before, keeping the EURUSD high is not as critical any more. But what is critical is to give the impression that Italian and Spanish sovereign risk is contained. And after all, let’s not forget that as of January, Italian bank holdings of Italy state bonds just hit a record of EUR200 billion.
Is it possible that the Fed, in all its generosity, transferred over several hundred billion over to these same Italian banks, courtesy of the cover provided by QE, so that the same Italian banks may monetize Italian bank bonds? And the same for Spain. Any wonder then that we got news of how flyingly great Spanish and Italian bond auction were in the past week?
After all, in Europe Germany has a heart attack whenever anyone perceives the ECB as monetizing, or even greenlighting the monetization of local sovereign bonds. But Germany has never said what it thinks about the Fed, indirectly, doing the same, using Italian and Spanish banks as conduits.
Finally, while we don’t know what the cash is being used for, we know that sooner or later, sometime around December 2013, when European, pardon, foreign bank holdings of US reserves, i.e., USD cash, hits well over $1.5 trillion, and when the Interest on Excess Reserves starts going up and the Fed is directly providing tens of billions in interest payment to European banks, some Americans may be angry to quite angry with that development.
But for now, everyone is blissfully unaware and even if they were, nobody cares. Why just look at the Dow Jones Industrial Average: how can one possibly allege that all is not well with the world…
Note: Click To Enlarge Photos Above
Model Jen Macloud Slams Ann Coulter For Inappropriate Remarks Towards Libertarians On Stossel
Neo-Conservative war hawk Ann Coulter is under fire again after upcoming model/speaker Jen Macloud decided to take aim on her remarks that shocked over 1,000+ libertarian students on John Stossel’s show last month on Fox Business.
Jen Macloud:
“The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour upon it, the more it will contract.”- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. What can I say about Ann Coulter that has not already been said by many a Libertarian? When I see this interview between her and John Stossel I recognize that she is an educated, strong, and consistent woman. I also see her ignorance, her contemptuous attitude toward Libertarians, and her stubbornness is like that of a toddler. Her stance on things like gay marriage and pot legalization are generic and narrow minded and not at all surprising. I don’t fault her for standing by her convictions on these issues even if they are different than mine. Her tactic of condescension and mocking, however, reminds me of what a poor debater (or a disinformation list) does when losing an argument. For example: she resorts to sidetracking opponents with name calling and ridicule and tries to emotionalize, antagonize, and goad opponents into an irrational response that would make their argument seem less credible to others. “First of all, for alleged individualists, you’re very mob-like,” Coulter snarked. “Libertarians and pot,” Coulter said with a dismissive laugh. “This is why people think Libertarians are p*ssies.” And of course she is full of fallacies. The Straw Man fallacy is committed when a person simply ignores a person’s actual position and substitutes a distorted, exaggerated or misrepresented version of that position. When discussing the legalization of all drugs and prostitution based on the belief that what one does and puts into their body is not the business of the government or anyone else as long as no one else or their liberties are harmed, Coulter immediately complains about Libertarians being suck ups to Liberals on the issue of pot and completely defers from discussing the other aspects of the question. She recognizes that it’s much easier to shoot down the idea of pot legalization than it is to debate the issue of having the freedom to own your body. She does make a sound point about her having to essentially pay for the negative consequences of said drug use since we are in a welfare society; but she fails to realize that being a welfare society isn’t set in stone and all great change must first come from a great idea. Like my grandfather once said to me about being homosexual: “If I understood it, I’d be it.” Ann can never understand why Libertarians are the way they are, therefore she can never share their mindset. I find it to be a waste of time to try to convince someone with this level of hardheadedness to turn to the dark side; even if we do have cookies. And they are delicious.
Ouch…
Those who are unaware of what actually happened during that heated debates here’s a breakdown published by djgabrielpresents on Feb 21, 2013.
Once a year, Stossel tapes a show at the International Students for Liberty Conference in Washington, D.C. He typically brings on friendly libertarian guests, like presidential candidate Gary Johnson, Reason magazine star Nick Gillespie, Cato Institute VP David Boaz, or up-and-coming Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI).
But just to show that the 1,400+ students are not beholden to either major political party, a liberal and a conservative will also join the show and mix things up. This year, Coulter was that conservative. And boy, did things get heated.
The initial conversation between Stossel and Coulter began as a light squabble over whether the War in Iraq was truly justified. The war was certainly worth the cost because Saddam Hussein was “definitely looking for uranium from Niger,” she said. Her remarks were met with tepid boos and confusion, but the room was mostly pleasant at that point.
But when the subject turned the the legalizing drugs, things quickly became tense. “Libertarians and pot,” Coulter said with a dismissive laugh. “This is why people think libertarians are pussies,” she said. “We’re living in a country that is 70-percent socialist, the government takes 60 percent of your money. They are taking care of your health care, of your pensions. They’re telling you who you can hire, what the regulations will be. And you want to suck up to your little liberal friends and say, ‘Oh, but we want to legalize pot.’ You know, if you’re a little more manly you would tell them what your position on employment discrimination is. How about that? But it’s always ‘We want to legalize pot.'”
Stossel then asked: “Why can’t gays get married?”
“Well, they can,” Coulter replied. “They have to marry a member of the opposite sex.” The room filled with boos.
“This is another one where you’re just sucking up to liberals when there are big fights,” Coulter explained.
“No, we believe the individual should be left alone,” Stossel shot back.
“Marriage is the most important institution to civilize young people. I make divorce a lot more difficult,” she said. “Liberals want to destroy the family,” she continued, eliciting jeers and mocking laughter from the students.
“How is it any of your business what I choose to put in my body if I’m not affecting anyone else?” one student asked during the Q&A, prompting the students to give a standing ovation.
“First of all, for alleged individualists, you’re very mob-like,” Coulter snarked. “Second of all, it is my business because we are living in a welfare state … Right now, I have to pay for, it turns out, coming down the pike, your health care. I have to pay for your unemployment when you can’t hold a job. I have to pay for your food, for your housing. Yeah, it’s my business!”
Stossel and the student eventually got Coulter to concede that if the welfare state were rolled back, she’d maybe consider legalizing marijuana.
Later on, a recently-divorced student asked Coulter why she wants to “make divorce more difficult” when it is already an incredibly cumbersome and taxing process. The conservative author’s response provoked more booing: “When you buy a refrigerator, to break a contract to return your refrigerator, is more difficult in most states than to break a marriage contract.”
One student, off-camera, shouted: “They’re human beings!” The crowd applauded.
After the segment wrapped, Coulter smiled and the crowd gave respectful applause. Seeing as how Coulter is a well-known good sport about engaging hostile environments, it’s no surprise she was game for the whole experience.
But on her “libertarians are pussies” point, since neither Stossel nor the students had the opportunity to fully respond, let me give it a brief whack: The economy may be more important than the the war on drugs or gay rights, but that’s a subjective valuation. Either way, libertarians care so much about those social issues not only because the former is rife with injustice, wastefulness, and abuse, but because they serve as a litmus test of sorts, separating those who are serious about limited government from those who pick and choose when they want to be skeptical of government power.
If you truly care about personal responsibility, limited government, and freedom of choice, then you should oppose government involvement in your personal life as much as in your economic life.
Those who agree with Jen Macloud please ‘LIKE‘ new Facebook fan page here: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jen-Macloud/464487490291243?fref=ts
Prince Vega 