FUNNIES FROM ARTHUR Cartoons and Comics

Maybe Obama is the Food Stamp President After All

After Obama's election in 2009 a small grocery store/convenience store in Florida changed its name to the Obama Express. Several other stores across the country did the same thing. One of those was a location in Baltimore, Maryland. Now, in 2013, the Maryland outlet is under investigation, accused of illegally trafficking in food stamps.

On September 17, WBAL reported that nine retailers in Baltimore County had been arrested for illegally redeeming food stamps for cash and kicking back a portion to food stamp recipients. The retailers did not sell them any merchandise or food.

One of those indicted was one Abdullah Aljaradi who allegedly obtained $2 million in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) cash from Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards.

Abdullah Aljaradi, age 51, of Baltimore; Second Obama Express and D&M Deli and Grocery, 901 Harlem Avenue, Suite A and B, respectively. From October 2010 through July 2013, Aljaradi allegedly obtained more than $2 million in payments for food sales that never occurred.

The office of the US Attorney, District of Maryland, has further information on the charges:

The indictments allege that the defendants exchanged EBT benefits for cash, in violation of the food stamp program rules. The indictments allege that the defendants typically paid half the value of the EBT benefits in cash. To avoid detection, the defendants often debited the funds from the card in multiple transactions over a period of hours or days. As a result of unlawful cash transactions, the defendants obtained more than $6,898,000 in EBT deposits for transactions in which the stores did not provide food.

If convicted, the nine retailers could get 20 years each in jail.

Breitbart

Democrat Alan Grayson Praises the Creation of Stealth Socialism in America

Congressman Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) — who once said in an elaborate presentation that the Republican healthcare plan is for the sick to “die quickly” — praised the creation of “stealth socialism” in America in a recent interview with David Dayen at Salon.

Speaking about the Federal Reserve’s rapidly-growing balance sheet, Grayson remarked:

We’ve had a government takeover of the bond market. Stealth socialism’s been created. Government simply ends up owning more and more and more. If government had taken over the steel industry, maybe it would have been more noticeable. They’ve taken over the financing of housing industry as well, with a desired result.

The “desired result” of said “stealth socialism,” the congressman said, is “housing ticking up again” and “setting a foundation for recovery for the U.S. economy.”

The Harvard-educated economist also spoke about the broader policies of the Federal Reserve and quantitative easing.

“Conceivably, we might be in a situation where the Fed has to buy $70 billion in assets in perpetuity,” he said. “It’s puzzling why there’s been no market reaction to that. But it has had its apparent intended purpose. It leaves you scratching your head a bit about how it worked and why it worked. You would think more than tripling the balance sheet would have some effect on the value of money, but so far no. There’s been no effect on inflation; in fact, it appears to have prevented deflation, an economic spiral and rounds of bankruptcy.” 

Grayson concluded the interview with a story of how he negotiated a 50 percent increase for bilingual HUD housing counseling, saying he did so by telling the Republicans to “put up or shut up” if they really want to improve their image among Hispanics.

“When push came to shove, they accepted the amendment, they wouldn’t allow a roll call vote on it. They didn’t want to have their people vote against Spanish-language housing counseling,” he said.  “They didn’t do it because I made pals with them. I scared the crap out of them!”

Jorge Bonilla (R), a U.S. Navy veteran whose parents immigrated to the United States from Puerto Rico, is running against Grayson in 2014.  He ridiculed Grayson’s remarks, noting that while Grayson claims to be able to “[scare] the crap” out of Republicans, he has so far refused Bonilla’s offer to debate.

“Mr. Grayson touts current monetary policy as providing a baseline for recovery, yet fails to notice that current job creation does not keep up with population growth, and that labor participation continues to crater (312,000 alone dropped out of the labor force last month),” a statement on Bonilla’s website reads.  

“The fact is that with his votes for Obamacare, the stimulus and anti-business Dodd-Frank legislation, Mr. Grayson is jointly responsible for this administration’s abysmal failure to create jobs or improve the economy.”

Bonilla suggested Grayson explain the benefits of “stealth socialism” to all those whose hours have been cut, who have lost their jobs, or “who have been dropped from their health care coverage due to the onerous mandates that he voted for.”

Thank You: The Blaze

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is changing their tune on Global Warming

There have already been leaks from this 31-page document, which summarizes 1,914 pages of scientific discussion, but thanks to a senior climate scientist, I have had a glimpse of the key prediction at the heart of the document. The big news is that, for the first time since these reports started coming out in 1990, the new one dials back the alarm. It states that the temperature rise we can expect as a result of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide is lower than the IPCC thought in 2007.

Admittedly, the change is small, and because of changing definitions, it is not easy to compare the two reports, but retreat it is. It is significant because it points to the very real possibility that, over the next several generations, the overall effect of climate change will be positive for humankind and the planet.

Specifically, the draft report says that "equilibrium climate sensitivity" (ECS)—eventual warming induced by a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which takes hundreds of years to occur—is "extremely likely" to be above 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), "likely" to be above 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.4 degrees Fahrenheit) and "very likely" to be below 6 degrees Celsius (10.8 Fahrenheit). In 2007, the IPPC said it was "likely" to be above 2 degrees Celsius and "very likely" to be above 1.5 degrees, with no upper limit. Since "extremely" and "very" have specific and different statistical meanings here, comparison is difficult.

Still, the downward movement since 2007 is clear, especially at the bottom of the "likely" range. The most probable value (3 degrees Celsius last time) is for some reason not stated this time.

A more immediately relevant measure of likely warming has also come down: "transient climate response" (TCR)—the actual temperature change expected from a doubling of carbon dioxide about 70 years from now, without the delayed effects that come in the next century. The new report will say that this change is "likely" to be 1 to 2.5 degrees Celsius and "extremely unlikely" to be greater than 3 degrees. This again is lower than when last estimated in 2007 ("very likely" warming of 1 to 3 degrees Celsius, based on models, or 1 to 3.5 degrees, based on observational studies).

Most experts believe that warming of less than 2 degrees Celsius from preindustrial levels will result in no net economic and ecological damage. Therefore, the new report is effectively saying (based on the middle of the range of the IPCC's emissions scenarios) that there is a better than 50-50 chance that by 2083, the benefits of climate change will still outweigh the harm.

Read More: The Wall Street Journal

What does New Jersey Really Know about Cory Booker?

Another @CoryBooker Fairy Tale: 

Who’s the tax hiker?

 

“Inadvertently Omitted”? 

@CoryBooker’s not-so-ethical disclosures

 

Firm paying @CoryBooker $689K 

received $2M from city agencies; 

tax returns show he still worked there.

 

Greedy @CoryBooker lied again; 

What else is he lying about?

 

Get to know Cory Booker at:

BookerFail.com

 

 

 

FUNNY VIDEO: Help Kickstart World War III!

The Global Warming Hoax MORE PROOF OF COOLING

A chilly Arctic summer has left nearly a million more square miles of ocean covered with ice than at the same time last year – an increase of 60 per cent.

The rebound from 2012’s record low comes six years after the BBC reported that global warming would leave the Arctic ice-free in summer by 2013.

Instead, days before the annual autumn re-freeze is due to begin, an unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretches from the Canadian islands to Russia’s northern shores.


The Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific has remained blocked by pack-ice all year. More than 20 yachts that had planned to sail it have been left ice-bound and a cruise ship attempting the route was forced to turn back.

Some eminent scientists now believe the world is heading for a period of cooling that will not end until the middle of this century – a process that would expose computer forecasts of imminent catastrophic warming as dangerously misleading.

The disclosure comes 11 months after The Mail on Sunday triggered intense political and scientific debate by revealing that global warming has ‘paused’ since the beginning of 1997 – an event that the computer models used by climate experts failed to predict.

In March, this newspaper further revealed that temperatures are about to drop below the level that the models forecast with ‘90 per cent certainty’.

The pause – which has now been accepted as real by every major climate research centre – is important, because the models’ predictions of ever-increasing global temperatures have made many of the world’s economies divert billions of pounds into ‘green’ measures to counter  climate change.
Those predictions now appear gravely flawed.

Read More: The Daily Mail

I guess Obama found Saddam's WMDs right where Bush said they were.

As Congress holds hearings to determine whether or not it will vote to authorize President Barack Obama to use military force in the Syrian civil war, it's hard not to think of the Bush administration's arguments for military intervention in Iraq 10 years ago.

The justification at that time was to disarm then-dictator Saddam Hussein and his Ba’athist regime of alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) — namely chemical and biological weapons. Of course, long after military operations began and continued into the next decade, those weapons were never found.

However, even back then, there were accusations from several sources that Hussein had smuggled his WMDs over the border into Syria long before coalition forces began the Iraqi invasion. Today, there is now video evidence  of chemical and biological weapons having been used in Syria to kill countless victims. While the blame game rages on as to who actually used said weapons, Assad forces or rebel fighters, many seem to have forgotten to ask a very important question: Where did these chemical weapons come from?

Was the Bush administration right all along? Could these indeed be the very same WMDs that intelligence agencies from around the world claimed were in Hussein’s possession which he then transferred over to Syria?

The earliest account of Hussein having hidden his WMDs in Syria came in January of 2004. Nizar Nayouf, an award-winning Syrian journalist who was granted political asylum in France, said in a letter to Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf not only that he knew Iraq’s WMDs were being hidden inside Syria, but that he could pinpoint precisely where they were being kept. According to Nayouf’s witness, described as a senior source inside Syrian military intelligence he had known for two years, Iraq’s WMDs were in tunnels dug under the town of al-Baida near the city of Hama in northern Syria, in the village of Tal Snan, north of the town of Salamija, and in the city of Sjinsjar on the Syrian border with the Lebanon, south of the city of Homs. Nayouf claimed that the transfer of Iraqi WMDs to Syria was organized by the commanders of Hussein’s Iraqi Republican Guard with the help of General Dhu al-Himma Shalish and Assef Shawkat, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s cousin and brother-in-law, respectively.

We know for a fact that Shalish had a working relationship with Hussein long before the war in Iraq. The Syrian government awarded Shalish and his company, SES International Corporation, exclusive rights on contracts to supply the Iraqi market with goods from construction materials to detergent. According to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Shalish and SES helped the former Ba’athist regime access weapons systems by issuing false end-user certificates to foreign suppliers that listed Syria as the final country of destination. SES International then transshipped the goods to Iraq, and Shalish was subsequently sanctioned by the U.S. for procuring defense-related goods for Hussein in violation of sanctions against Iraq.

When two sources from the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) — a 1,400-member team organized by the Pentagon and CIA — spoke with the Washington Times in August 2004, they reported that Hussein periodically removed guards on the Syrian border and replaced them with his own intelligence agents who supervised the movement of banned materials between the two countries. The shift was followed by the movement of trucks in and out of Syria suspected of carrying materials banned by UN sanctions. Once the shipments were made, the agents would leave and the regular border guards would resume their posts.

A similar claim was made by Lieutenant General Moshe Ya’alon in December of 2005, a former Israeli military officer who served as chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces from July 2002 to June 2005. “(Hussein) transferred the chemical agents from Iraq to Syria” six weeks before Operation Iraqi Freedom started, according to Ya’alon. “No one went to Syria to find it.”

Just a month later in January 2006, the Iraqi general who served as the No. 2 official in Hussein’s air force, Georges Sada, claimed Iraq moved WMDs into Syria before the war by loading the weapons into two civilian aircrafts in which the passenger seats were removed, as well as in multiple ground convoys of trucks.

“There are weapons of mass destruction gone out from Iraq to Syria, and they must be found and returned to safe hands,” Sada stated. “I am confident they were taken over [to Syria].”

Read More: Policy Mic

Will Hunting Drones Become a New Sport?

Deer Trail, Colo. residents are already lining up for permits, reports Reuters, apparently keen to blast unmanned aerial vehicles out of the sky. Town clerk Kim Oldfield said the whole thing started when resident Phillip Steel, worried that the country’s becoming “a surveillance society,” pitched the idea of issuing permits to hunt drones as a way to protest their rise (hypothetically anyway) on the national scene.

That led town trustees to decide last month that the question warranted a public vote. And once the decision to put it to a vote was reached, applications for the $25 permits began pouring in — not just from Deer Trail residents, says Oldfield, but everywhere, including a few from folks living in the U.K. and Canada.

“I stopped counting when it hit 985,” Oldfield told Reuters. Deer Trail’s population was 546 as of the 2010 census.

Not that anyone’s looking to pick off a bunch of unmanned vehicles, says Oldfield, noting that those in favor of the drone-hunting permits want to stage a contest — basically a skeet shoot using drones in lieu of clay disks — which could promote tourism and allow the city to reap a little extra revenue.

Still, the Federal Aviation Administration isn’t amused, issuing a note last summer when the ball started rolling pretty much warning people to keep their weapons holstered if a drone happens by, permit or no. ”Shooting at an unmanned aircraft could result in criminal or civil liability, just as would firing at a manned airplane,” said the government agency.

A Strange Funny by: TIME online

More Money for ACORN? Really?

ACORN, the supposedly defunct organization defunded by Congress in the aftermath of James O’Keefe’s video exposing ACORN employees’ willingness to help pimps and prostitutes attain government benefits, is back. As Judicial Watch has uncovered, the Obama administration offered $445 million to a former ACORN official as part of a $7.6 billion government program designed to help “unemployed or substantially underemployed” Americans make their mortgage payments.

The ACORN official, Joe McGavin, is director of Hardest Hit, an Illinois program that received that massive Treasury infusion. Prior to his time at Hardest Hit, McGaven was director of counseling for ACORN Housing in Chicago, and the operations manager for Affordable Housing Centers of America (AHCOA), an ACORN affiliate.



While ACORN was supposedly cut off from taxpayers, the facts say otherwise. And this is just the latest indicator. As Judicial Watch reported, “ACORN got tens of thousands of dollars in grants to ‘combat housing and lending discrimination.’ The money came via Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which awarded a $79,819 grant to AHCOA.”



Don’t be surprised to see the new, reorganized ACORN – now spread out across the country, without benefit of the ACORN label – play a role in the 2012 election cycle.

Thank You: Breitbart

The EPA is getting a little out of hand.

When agents with the Alaska Environmental Crimes Task Force surged out of the wilderness around the remote community of Chicken wearing body armor and jackets emblazoned with POLICE in big, bold letters, local placer miners didn’t quite know what to think.

Did it really take eight armed men and a squad-size display of paramilitary force to check for dirty water? Some of the miners, who run small businesses, say they felt intimidated.

Others wonder if the actions of the agents put everyone at risk. When your family business involves collecting gold far from nowhere, unusual behavior can be taken as a sign someone might be trying to stage a robbery. How is a remote placer miner to know the people in the jackets saying POLICE really are police?

Miners suggest it might have been better all around if officials had just shown up at the door -- as they used to do -- and said they wanted to check the water.

Read More: The Alaska Dispatch

Is Anderson Cooper Stupid or Just Another Left Wing Liar?

Anderson Cooper and CNN have been caught staging fake news about Syria to justify military intervention.

The primary “witness” that the mainstream media is using as a source in Syria has been caught staging fake news segments.  Recent video evidence proves that “Syria Danny”, the supposed activist who has been begging for military intervention on CNN, is really just a paid actor and a liar.

While Assad is definitely a tyrant like any head of state, a US invasion of the country is a worst case scenario for the people living there.
By pointing out that the mainstream media is orchestrating their entire coverage of this incident, we are not denying that there is a tremendous amount of death and violence in Syria right now.  However, we are showing that the mainstream media version of events is scripted and staged propaganda.

The following video shows him contradicting himself while off air, and even asking crew members to “get the gunfire sounds ready” for his video conference with Anderson Cooper on CNN.

 

“Syria Danny” has also appeared on many other news programs, and every single time his story on specific events has changed.

This is not the first time that mainstream media has been exposed as propaganda, it happens all the time, especially during times of war.
Some of the most hyped up news images of our time surrounding war were not actually real but were simply public relations stunts, designed as psychological warfare operations.

No one in America can forget the image of Saddam Hussein’s statue being toppled and covered with an American flag, yet few people realize that this was a hoax, a staged psychological operation coordinated between the military and the media.  In July of 2004 journalist Jon Elmer exposed an internal army study of the war showing that this whole statue scenario was indeed a set up.

Read More: Friends of Syria