[email_link]

Continued

SOURCE: https://www.zerohedge.com

[email_link]

DO NOT QUESTION ANYTHING ON LIBYA BUT QUESTION ROMNEY’S GOOD INTENTIONS.

MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell on Tuesday questioned the sincerity of a “storm relief” event organized by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in Ohio, arguing that the Red Cross apparently has no need for donated clothes or canned goods.

“You’ve got the image of Mitt Romney doing what, they say, is not a campaign event in the same space they were going to hold a campaign event. They say they’re making collections for hurricane and storm relief,” the MSNBC anchor said during a Tuesday broadcast of “Mitchell Reports.”

“We checked with the Red Cross. The Red Cross said, while they’re always grateful for donations, that this is not what they need or want. They always tell people, ‘please donate money, because we have our own packagers, wholesalers’ — they have their own distribution system,” she continued.

Continued

SOURCE: http://www.theblaze.com

[email_link]

Most Americans have never heard of the National Response Coordination Center, but they’re lucky it exists on days of lethal winds and flood tides. The center is the war room of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, where officials gather to decide where rescuers should go, where drinking water should be shipped, and how to assist hospitals that have to evacuate.

Disaster coordination is one of the most vital functions of “big government,” which is why Mitt Romney wants to eliminate it. At a Republican primary debate last year, Mr. Romney was asked whether emergency management was a function that should be returned to the states. He not only agreed, he went further.

“Absolutely,” he said. “Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction. And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better.” Mr. Romney not only believes that states acting independently can handle the response to a vast East Coast storm better than Washington, but that profit-making companies can do an even better job. He said it was “immoral” for the federal government to do all these things if it means increasing the debt.

It’s an absurd notion, but it’s fully in line with decades of Republican resistance to federal emergency planning. FEMA, created by President Jimmy Carter, was elevated to cabinet rank in the Bill Clinton administration, but was then demoted by President George W. Bush, who neglected it, subsumed it into the Department of Homeland Security, and placed it in the control of political hacks. The disaster of Hurricane Katrina was just waiting to happen.

Continued

SOURCE: http://www.nytimes.com

[email_link]

BEIJING — The mother of China’s prime minister was a schoolteacher in northern China. His father was ordered to tend pigs in one of Mao’s political campaigns. And during childhood, “my family was extremely poor,” the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, said in a speech last year.

But now 90, the prime minister’s mother, Yang Zhiyun, not only left poverty behind, she became outright rich, at least on paper, according to corporate and regulatory records. Just one investment in her name, in a large Chinese financial services company, had a value of $120 million five years ago, the records show.

The details of how Ms. Yang, a widow, accumulated such wealth are not known, or even if she was aware of the holdings in her name. But it happened after her son was elevated to China’s ruling elite, first in 1998 as vice prime minister and then five years later as prime minister.

Continued

SOURCE: http://www.nytimes.com