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Putin talks NSA, Syria, Iran, and Drones in Exclusive Video

OK..it's sort of a slow news day. All anyone wants to talk about is Megyn Kelly getting the 9pm slot at FOX News. So, rejoicing as I am in the completely unexpected success of my beloved Red Sox this season, and hopeful of pissing off as many Yankees fans as possible, I thought I'd start a baseball thread.

Using Dark Force to Maintain Sith Power DESERT HOT SPRINGS, CA – Sometimes a casual remark is all that is needed to reveal what a person really thinks. Kinda like the way liquor will loosen a man’s lips. Obviously, the city of Desert Hot Springs is not the evil empire. But read the city manager’s emails and its obvious he thinks it is. This is no case of sloppy sentence construction. In an email to a private citizen Rick Daniels is caught politicking, using city equipment and on city time. The email to [Name Withheld] was attempting to sway this...

If President Obama is truly the "Reagan of the Left," then it's only fair to ask: What does Obama consider "evil" and an "evil empire?" After all, since Obama's second inaugural address, commentators both left and right have been busily comparing Obama to Reagan. The Daily Beast: "[Obama] wants to do for liberalism...what Ronald Reagan did for conservatism." E.J. Dionne: "Obama's role model is Ronald Reagan[.]" Charles Krauthammer: "[Obama's] second inaugural address... is his self-proclamation as the Reagan of the Left." Besides noting the stark ideological differences of each president, most pundits agreed that Obama shares with Reagan not just...

President Vladimir Putin signed a controversial measure banning the adoption of Russian children by U.S. families, the Kremlin said Friday. The action could affect hundreds of American families seeking to adopt. Americans adopted close to 1,000 Russian children last year, according to U.S. State Department figures.

The New York Yankees' World Series hopes may have just taken a hit, as shortstop Derek Jeter fractured his left ankle in game one of the American League Championship Series against the Detroit Tigers on Saturday night. Jeter suffered the injury while fielding a ground ball in the top of the 12th inning, with New York trailing 5-4. He immediately went down in pain, staying face down momentarily.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry's over the weekend condemned a U.S. State Department statement that said Washington was closely monitoring territorial disputes in the South China Sea, and that China's establishment of a military garrison for the area risks "further escalating tensions in the region". The mosaic of rival territorial claims in the South China Sea has become Asia's worst potential military flashpoint. Beijing has said its disputes with Vietnam, the Philippines and other southeast Asian claimants should be settled one-on-one, and it has bristled at U.S. backing for a multilateral approach to solving the overlapping claims. "We are entirely entitled...

During his visit to Vietnam in early June, U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta displayed eagerness to have the U.S. military return to the bases it once occupied at Cam Ranh Bay. The Pentagon lost its foothold there when South Vietnam fell to communist forces in the mid-1970s, and military officials have longed to regain access. Once Washington established diplomatic relations with Hanoi in 1995, that objective seemed to be an attainable goal rather than a hopeless wish. The Vietnamese government, worried about China’s growing power in the region, may now be receptive to a renewed U.S. military presence at...

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AP) — The Obama administration pressed Beijing on Thursday to accept a code of conduct for resolving territorial disputes in the resource-rich South China Sea, a difficult U.S. mediation effort that has faced resistance from the communist government. It has endeared the U.S., however, to once-hostile countries in Southeast Asia. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton met with Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi on the sidelines of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations' annual conference. Sitting across from each other at a long table in a grand hall with chandeliers, Clinton stressed the different ways Washington...

China recently declared that most of the 3.5 million square kilometers South China Sea had become Sansha, the latest Chinese city. The area China claims is within the city limits comprises over two million square kilometers of largely open ocean and a few hundred tiny islands and reefs, many of which are only above water during low tide. Sansha is administered from one of the Paracel islands (Woody Island). The U.S. government responded by asking that China obey international law. China currently claims South China Sea areas close to neighboring nations, except for areas about 22 kilometers from the coast....

China's state-run media ramped up condemnation of the United States on Monday over tensions in the South China Sea, with the Communist Party's top newspaper telling Washington to "Shut up" and charging it with "fanning flames" of division in the region. The Chinese Foreign Ministry's over the weekend condemned a U.S. State Department statement that said Washington was closely monitoring territorial disputes in the South China Sea, and that China's establishment of a military garrison for the area risks "further escalating tensions in the region". The mosaic of rival territorial claims in the South China Sea has become Asia's worst...

........This week, Beijing set up a new provincial-level city government to administer all its island claims in the South China Sea, as well as administer all the waters in the Sea, and “elected” a mayor for its insta-city of Sansha. The new governing council will represent approximately 1,100 Chinese residents of three island groups, all of which are claimed by multiple countries, including Taiwan, the Philippines, and Vietnam, in addition to China. The real news, however, is that Beijing is also setting up a military garrison on Yongxing Island, which is also claimed by Vietnam. The garrison will serve “self-defense”...

Last week during an East Asia Summit meeting in Phnom Penh, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tried to stand fast and use diplomacy to resolve claims over territorial waters in the South China Sea. China has insisted that it had “’indisputable sovereignty’ over Islands that are claimed by Vietnam to the Scarborough Shoal near the Philippines. They include Islands near Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan. Secretary Clinton urged the nations to collectively negotiate with the Chinese regarding territorial waters. China wanted bilateral talks with each country where they felt they can intimate the nations into surrounding territorial claims without much...

HK, Taiwan, mainland activists plan to land on Diaoyu islands A Hong Kong activist group set sail on Sunday for the Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea, known as the Senkaku in Japan, in an attempt to join forces with counterparts from the mainland China and Taiwan to assert China's sovereignty over the islands. The official Global Times reported that the Action Committee for Defending the Diaoyu Islands set sail at noon from the Tsim Sha Tsui pier in Hong Kong with four crewmembers and 11 activists aboard, including one Macanese and one mainland Chinese. Chan Miu-tak, chairman of...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Okay, Ronald Reagan March 8, 2013, Orlando, this was at the National Association of Evangelicals' annual convention. By the way, just so there's no confusion, the reason I'm playing these bites for you is so that you understand, especially those of you who were too young or not interested back in 1983, that this is nothing new, that a president who won election in two landslides spoke the same way as Santorum. I'm not saying that Santorum is Reagan. I'm saying that what is happening with Santorum, the fact that he believes what he believes, is not...

Last Friday, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in the first month of this year 243,000 jobs were created and the unemployment rate fell to 8.3 percent. This good news is a mirage. It is due to faulty seasonal adjustments and to the BLS birth/death model. In a prolonged downturn, seasonal adjustments and the birth/death model produce nonexistent employment. The unadjusted data show a rise in the unemployment rate. The birth/death model, which estimates the net effect of jobs lost from business failures and jobs created by new start-ups, was designed for a normal growing economy, not for...

A-Rod just stuck out swinging to give Detroit the series and a trip to the ALCS finals. Final score 3-2.

A group of 14 acclaimed Russian intellectuals, including human rights activists, artists, film directors, writers and aides of the late President Boris Yeltsin have published an open statement condemning the present regime for “completely destroying the institution of democratic elections in Russia.” Election results are shamelessly falsified by the authorities, while opposition parties and activists are “unconstitutionally” denied registration to run in elections under cooked up pretexts. As a result, subjects of the Russian state are disfranchised from the political system rendering it illegitimate. The statement describes as “vicious” the so called “vertical of power”—a system of personalized authoritarian rule...

What is the world coming to? Pat Dollard reports the Russian leader warned the US against adopting socialism because it doesn't work: Russian Prime Minister Vladamir Putin has said the US should take a lesson from the pages of Russian history and not exercise “excessive intervention in economic activity and blind faith in the state’s omnipotence”. “In the 20th century, the Soviet Union made the state’s role absolute,” Putin said during a speech at the opening ceremony of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “In the long run, this made the Soviet economy totally uncompetitive. This lesson cost us...

Russian Prime Minister Vladamir Putin has said the US should take a lesson from the pages of Russian history and not exercise “excessive intervention in economic activity and blind faith in the state’s omnipotence”. “In the 20th century, the Soviet Union made the state’s role absolute,” Putin said during a speech at the opening ceremony of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “In the long run, this made the Soviet economy totally uncompetitive. This lesson cost us dearly. I am sure nobody wants to see it repeated.” Sounding more like Barry Goldwater than the former head of the KGB,...