Rick Rules Primer on Contrarian Speculation

In an interview with Louis James, Rick Rule provides an excellent summary of what contrarian speculation investment is and makes a powerful case that the current metals climate means gold stocks are the play to . . . → Read More: Rick Rule?s Primer on Contrarian Speculation

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http://jutiagroup.com/20120510-rick-rules-primer-on-contrarian-speculation/

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NATO Summit Roundup: Police Threaten Occupy
Chicago Protesters & More

Heads of states and heads of governments from the member countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) are scheduled to be in Chicago for a major summit. The summit is the first NATO summit to be hosted in an American city other than[...]

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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/firedoglake/fdl/~3/93SBL5iLqG8/

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Back to the Deficit

The House plans to vote today on a Republican plan to avoid the $110 billion in Pentagon sequestration cuts that would be triggered at the end of the year because of the failure of last year's supercommittee. "People know at the end of the day that this is not going to be all sunshine and cotton candy," said Representative Tom Cole, a Republican from Oklahoma.

Unfortunately, the Republicans' plan to fix the deficit hurts the poorest in our country the most?the bill, which would save $261.5 billion over the next ten years, would leave an estimated 1.8 million people without food stamps, cut Medicare by $22.7 billion, and stop a program that helps homeowners facing foreclosure. Senate Democrats and Obama have threatened to "pull the trigger" on the defense cuts unless Republicans agree to work with them on a compromise that entails spending cuts and tax increases."My message to them is simple," Obama said. "No. I will veto any effort to get rid of those automatic spending cuts to domestic and defense spending. There will be no easy off-ramps on this one." Democrats proposed an alternate plan on Wednesday which would cut oil, gas, and agriculture subsidies and impose the Buffett Rule.

The Latest

• Solar Installers Offer Deals, Gaining Converts  The New York Times
• How a Radical Greek Rescue Plan Fell Short The Wall Street Journal
• Green Mountain Coffee: A Giddy Win for Short-Sellers Bloomberg Businessweek
• Government Job Cuts Threaten Black Middle Class  NPR

Chart of the Day

Let's go house hunting! The cost of an average mortage payment has decreased enough where you can probably find a bigger and better house to buy and live in than to simply rent.

?Reuters

Reason to Get Out of Bed in the Morning

 

President Obama announced his support for gay marriage yesterday! Finally. 
 

?The American Prospect

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http://prospect.org/article/back-deficit

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Is Mitt Romney a Bully

The presidential campaign story of the day is Jason Horowitz's lengthy portrait of Mitt Romney's days as a student at the elite Cranbrook prep school in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. While the story contains a lot of detail that paints the picture of who the youthful Mitt Romney was and what kind of environments he grew up in, the headline-grabbing part is Romney's leading role, corroborated by several witnesses, in a vicious assault on a classmate whom everyone thought was gay. Partisan Democrats are certainly going to use this to make the case that the incident gives us important insight into Romney's character. I'll get to what I think this does and doesn't tell us about him in a moment, but here's the key passage:

Mitt Romney returned from a three-week spring break in 1965 to resume his studies as a high school senior at the prestigious Cranbrook School. Back on the handsome campus, studded with Tudor brick buildings and manicured fields, he spotted something he thought did not belong at a school where the boys wore ties and carried briefcases. John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn't having it.

"He can't look like that. That's wrong. Just look at him!" an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann's recollection. Mitt, the teenaged son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber's look, Friedemann recalled.

A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school's collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber's hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.

The postscript to this incident is that Romney's punishment for the assault was ... nothing. Maybe the administration never heard about it, or maybe they did but decided it was just ordinary youthful hijinks, or maybe they decided that since Mitt was the governor's son, they'd just let it slide. Lauber, on the other hand, was later expelled when he was caught smoking a cigarette.

Now, on to what this tells us about Mitt Romney. For the most part, I think everyone should be forgiven for pretty much anything they do before they hit about 20 or so. We've all done stupid, insensitive, even cruel things as teenagers, even if most of us never did anything quite that cruel. Thankfully, our society is coming to an understanding about the harm that bullying causes, but in 1965, a young man who seemed a bit effeminate being tortured by his classmates seemed to most people to be utterly unproblematic, even expected.

Places like Cranbrook taught their charges that the world had a hierarchical order, that order was just and good, and their place was at the top of it. Few people would understand that message more deeply than the governor's son. And someone in their very midst who dyed his hair was a threat to that order. So young Mitt's reaction was unsurprising: "He can't look like that. That's wrong. Just look at him!" The offender had to be made to understand that non-conformity was not acceptable. And oh boy, was he ever made to understand. Mitt made sure of that.

Let's accept for the moment that the 18-year-old Mitt Romney was a premium-grade jerk, but unlike in a teen movie where the snobby rich asshole gets his comeuppance in the end, he went on to become Cranbrook's proudest product. It's almost half a century later. Does this story tell us anything about the man he is today, or the kind of president he'd be?

I'm really not sure. Whether Romney ever believed that privilege was nothing more than the birthright of aristocrats like him, today he seems to believe, along with the rest of his class, that their privilege is actually something they earned, and those who don't occupy the same exalted place they do just need to tug on those bootstraps a little more vigorously. Is there a correlation between the kind of cruel streak that makes you hold down a screaming, crying boy and cut off his hair, and the kind of cruel streak that makes you want to take away people's health insurance? On one hand, Mitt Romney is a grown man, not the teenager he was. I would be shocked if the process of maturation didn't make him more reflective and less impulsive, and even lead him to regret some of the things he did as a young person. That happens to almost everyone.

On the other hand, we express our personalities and our values?those of today, not those of our youthful selves?through our politics. Imagine that what this story actually said was that Mitt bravely stood up for his gay classmate in the face of the other boys' scorn, showing himself to be admirably humane and courageous. Would that change the consequences of the things he advocates today? Would that make it less abhorrent that he wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act, or that he wants to cut social programs, or that he wants to cut protections for clean air and clean water, or that he thinks gay people should be second-class citizens? No. Whether he wants to do those things because deep down in his soul he's a cruel person and always has been, or because he's perfectly kind to the people he meets but believes in an ideology that is fundamentally cruel, doesn't matter a bit. He's not asking us to elect him hall prefect, he's asking us to elect him president. This story is certainly colorful and interesting, but it shouldn't change what we think about Mitt Romney as a candidate.

Read The Full Article:
http://prospect.org/article/mitt-romney-bully

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Salmonella in Pet Food

Perhaps I don't point it out often enough but The Stars Hollow Gazette and DocuDharma are group blogs and without member contributions they wouldn't be much.My activist brother thinks I'm intimidating and perhaps he's right, however my intention is to be[...]

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http://www.docudharma.com/diary/29846/salmonella-in-pet-food

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Cartnoon

Duck!  Rabbit!  Duck! [...]

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http://www.docudharma.com/diary/29845/cartnoon-by-ek-hornbeck

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From disorderly conduct to bullying, even
Romney's image is a flip-flop

Buzzfeed brought a story from Mitt Romney's past back yesterday, reminding voters of the candidate's arrest for disorderly conduct in 1981. (This is interesting in the context of John's post on AMERICAblog Gay about Romney having organized a small mob to physically bully a gay student in high school.)On its face, a rap sheet isn't the worst thing for a candidate like Romney. The...

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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Americablog/~3/74SmKaS5eQU/disorderly-conduct-and-
bullying-even.html

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Former Classmates Recall Romney Attack on Gay
Student

enlarge

Wow. Here I thought Mitt Romney's cruel streak was in that he likes to fire people. Five of Romney's former classmates from a prestigious all-boys college prep school recall a "vicious" attack on a new student who Romney and others believed to be gay.

The Washington Post reports:

Mitt Romney returned from a three-week spring break in 1965 to resume his studies as a high school senior at the prestigious Cranbrook School. Back on the handsome campus, studded with Tudor brick buildings and manicured fields, he spotted something he thought did not belong at a school where the boys wore ties and carried briefcases. John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn?t having it.

?He can?t look like that. That?s wrong. Just look at him!? an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann?s recollection. Mitt, the teenaged son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber?s look, Friedemann recalled.

A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school?s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber?s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.

Romney never received any punishment for his actions.

Lauber was expelled from the school after being caught smoking on school grounds. He "came out" to family and close friends. Among other jobs, he later worked as a civilian contractor in Bosnia and Iraq. He died of liver cancer in 2004, according to his sisters.

Read The Full Article:
http://crooksandliars.com/diane-sweet/former-classmates-recall-romney-attack

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Worst Twitter Reactions To Obamas Support For
Marriage Equality

Yesterday we brought you the most inspiring tweets about the President’s new support for marriage equality. Today, we wanted to share some of the worst — and most spiteful — responses on Twitter.

Have you seen others? Share them with us in the comments!

Read The Full Article:
http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2012/05/10/481748/worst-twitter-reactions-to-obamas
-support-for-marriage-equality/

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U.S. Military Taught Officers: ‘Islam Must
Change Or We Will Facilitate Its Self-Destruction’

A cartoon from a Joint Staff Forces College presentation on "Jihad: Defined and Operationalized"

Newly disclosed documents reveal the Islamophobic teaching materials used in the Joint Forces Staff College’s cancelled course ?Perspectives on Islam and Islamic Radicalism.” The course, which led the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to order a review of all training material in the U.S. military last month, incorporated crude stereotypes of Muslims and promoted a “total war” against Muslims.

The documents, released by Wired’s Danger Room blog, show a series of training materials steeped in anti-Muslim bigotry and repeating Islamophobic characterizations of Islam and Muslims. The Army officer who delivered the lecture, Lt. Col. Matthew A. Dooley, still holds his position at the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia, pending an investigation. Dooley’s PowerPoint presentations incorporated inflamatory material, such as:

Using the lessons of “Hiroshima” to wipe out whole cities at once, targeting the “civilian population wherever necessary” in a “total war” against Muslims. [PDF]

Claiming “there is no such as thing as ‘moderate Islam,’” and “It is therefore time for the United States to make our true intentions clear. This barbaric ideology will no longer be tolerated. Islam must change or we will facilitate its self-destruction.” [PDF]

Promoting a four phase plan to impose a transformation of Islam. Phase three includes possible outcomes like “Islam reduced to a cult status” and “Saudi Arabia threatened with starvation.” [PDF]

Asserting, “By conservative estimates,” 10 percent of the world’s Muslims, “a staggering 140 million people … hate everything you stand for and will never coexist with you, unless you submit” to Islam.

And, surprisingly, Dooley, taught Army officers that international laws protecting civilians in wartime are “no longer relevant” and that the “historical precedents of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki” could be applied to bringing about “Mecca and Medina['s] destruction.” [PDF] Dooley, as shown in the slide below, questioned whether “moderate” Muslims exist.

Dooley also invited controversial guest lecturers, such as former FBI employee John Guandolo who has alleged that President Obama has fallen under the influence of Islamic extremists and, in his reference materials for the Joint Forces Staff College, portrayed Muslims as enemies of the west and sought to justify the crusades as a response to “years of Muslim incursion into Western lands.” This view tracks closely with training materials uncovered by ThinkProgress last October, revealing that the U.S. Army War College’s shadowy think tank, the Proteus Management Group, cultivated the anti-Muslim course materials uncovered at the FBI and the Army’s training facilities.

Dooley’s presentations have sent ripples across the U.S. military and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey, ordered every military chief and senior commander to dispose of any similar anti-Islam instructional materials.

Read The Full Article:
http://thinkprogress.org/security/2012/05/10/481653/us-military-taught-total-war-
on-islam/

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