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The White House is now openly pushing for replacing Egypt President Hosni Mubarak with a temporary caretaker government that includes the military and is applauding a decision by Mubarak’s son to step down as head of the country’s ruling party. But a senior administration official said those steps weren’t enough - and suggested that Mubarak needs to take “additional steps” to quell the chaos in the streets of Cairo, which is threatening to sink Egypt’s already foundering economy. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, speaking to a conference of allies in Munich, Germany, on Saturday, expressed support for a transition effort...

Frank Wisner, a former ambassador to Egypt who was sent to Cairo earlier this week by President Obama meet with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, said Mubarak “must stay in office” to guide his country through important transitions in the coming months. “You need to get a national consensus around the pre-conditions for the next step forward,” Wisner told the Munich Security Conference on Saturday. “The president must stay in office in order to steer those changes through.” Wisner said he considered Mubarak’s continued leadership in his country “critical.”

US special envoy Frank Wisner has said that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak should remain in power to oversee a transition to democracy. The remarks appear to contradict previous US calls for Mr Mubarak to begin an immediate transition.

For the first time since 2008, inflation is hitting consumers in the stomach. Grocery prices grew by more than 1 1/2 times the overall rate of inflation this year, outpaced only by costs of transportation and medical care, according to numbers released Wednesday by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Economists predict that this is only the beginning. Fueled by the higher costs of wheat, sugar, corn, soybeans and energy, shoppers could see as much as a 4 percent increase at the supermarket checkout next year.

It is a war of words, because words stand for ideas. Winston Churchill said that history would be kind to him, because he would write it. Inflation is not coming, it is here. Perhaps calling debasement of the currency “Quantitative Easing” has allowed the government hand of inflation slip into our pockets a little bit less noticed than in the 1970’s. The dirty secret, however, is not what the Fed has been calling it. The Consumer Price Index, used almost universally to measure inflation, does not recognize inflation when packages have been “Obamasized”: That’s because of how the CPI—the Consumer...

Remember the “Misery Index?” If, like me, you are a “child of the 70’s and 80’s,” then you probably have some acquaintance with the term. Yet we don’t hear much about the Misery Index anymore. And given all that is and is not happening economically in our country right now, it seems like an appropriate time to bring back the index, although we’ll need to amend it just a bit. Let me explain. Back in 2009 when my co-author and I were doing research for our new book “The Virtues Of Capitalism,” I came across some background information about the...

Bahukutumbi Raman, writing in Forbes , asks the same question AT writers and readers have been asking for months. "Is Obama another Jimmy Carter?" The defiant action of North Korea in testing a long-range missile with military applications last month, and its latest act of defiance in reportedly carrying out an underground nuclear test on May 25, can be attributed--at least partly, if not fully--to its conviction that it will have nothing to fear from the Obama administration for its acts of defiance. It is true that even when George Bush was the president, North Korea had carried out its...

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama is making another overture to Cuba, asking the island's communist government to resume talks that his predecessor halted on legal immigration of Cubans to the United States.

CQ's Josh Rogin reports: The White House has given the Pentagon guidance to delay procurement of aerial refueling tankers by five years and cancel plans for a new long-range bomber, according to three sources close to the discussions. No final decisions have been made, and the recommendations are part of negotiations between the Office of Management and Budget and the Defense Department over possible budget trade-offs this year, the sources said. The guidance represents two of the offset options that OMB gave the Pentagon last month regarding the fiscal 2010 Defense budget request. If the guidance survives the internal budget...

WASHINGTON – With thousands of fraud investigations under way, the FBI is considering shifting agents away from counterterrorism work to help sort through the wreckage of the financial meltdown. FBI Deputy Director John Pistole told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that the bureau may reassign some of the positions that were reallocated to anti-terrorism work after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Such a move would be a further sign of the government breaking with the Bush administration's priorities, which pledged to assign every available resource to averting another terrorist attack.

President Obama seeks Russia deal to slash nuclear weapons President Obama will convene the most ambitious arms reductions talks with Russia for a generation, aiming to slash each country’s stockpile of nuclear weapons by 80 per cent. The radical treaty would reduce the number of nuclear warheads to 1,000 each, The Times has learnt. Key to the initiative is a review of the Bush Administration’s plan to deploy a US missile defence shield in eastern Europe, a project fiercely opposed by Moscow. Mr Obama is to establish a non-proliferation office at the White House to oversee the talks, expected to...

President Obama will convene the most ambitious arms reduction talks with Russia for a generation, aiming to slash each country’s stockpile of nuclear weapons by 80 per cent. The radical treaty would cut the number of nuclear warheads to 1,000 each, The Times has learnt. Key to the initiative is a review of the Bush Administration’s plan for a US missile defence shield in Eastern Europe, a project fiercely opposed by Moscow. Mr Obama is to establish a non-proliferation office at the White House to oversee the talks, expected to be headed by Gary Samore, a non-proliferation negotiator in the...

The latest news (aside from the SuperBowl) is that the Republicans in Congress have attempted to have their castration reversed. That's right: for some reason, they finally decided -- after the election, and therefore too late -- to act like conservatives: the House has rejected the Stimulus Bill in a bipartisan fashion, with not a single Republican vote. Let me repeat that. Not a single Republican vote. Do you realize what that means? It means that, after the $700 billion dollar "emergency bailout" (Epic FAIL!), the Congress has received such an earful from its constituents, that even after the shellacking...

IN his "first message to the Muslim world" Tuesday, President Obama on Al-Arabiya TV invited the Is lamic Republic in Iran to "unclench its fist" and accept his offer of "un conditional talks." A few hours later, after Obama had appeared on the Saudi-owned satellite-TV channel, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told a crowd of militants that no talks are possible unless the United States met a set of conditions. He demanded a formal apology for unspecified US "crimes"

"Then he is asked if he regrets “having given arms and advice to future terrorists,” and he responds, “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?” The interviewer then says, “Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.” But Brzezinski responds, “Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn’t a global Islam….” [Le Nouvel Observateur (Paris), 1/15/1998]"

Our Republican Party has a 21st Century policy to lower gas prices and achieve energy security through increased American: 1. Production 2. Conservation 3. Free Market innovation The Democratic Party has a 1970s scheme that will raise gas prices and create energy insecurity through increased Government: 1. Taxation 2. Regulation 3. Intervention snip Never one to quit when he was behind, on June 30, 1980, Jimmy Carter signed the Energy Security Act (ESA) into law. snip The SFC established ambitious production targets of 500,000 barrels of synthetic fuel per day by 1987; and 2 million barrels of synthetic fuel per...

Earlier this month, in a curious instance of life imitating art, the "3 a.m. phone call" that Hillary Clinton made famous in her campaign advertisement (suggesting that Barack Obama was not ready to handle international emergencies) became all too real. On August 8, 2008, at around 3 a.m. in Washington, the story broke that Russia was bombing several sites in neighboring Georgia. Minutes later, Georgian president and American ally Mikhail Saakashvili announced that Russia was conducting a large-scale military invasion of his country. How the candidates handled that call and reacted to the crisis may have a major impact on...

BACK TO JIMMY - What Biden Pick Really Signals BY choosing Sen. Joseph Biden as his vice-presiden tial running mate, Barack Obama sent three messages. The first two are implicit admissions that Hillary Clinton had a point in the primaries. The third tells us more of what Obama means by "change." Biden is supposed to make up for Obama's lack of the knowledge and experience needed to leader on national security and international affairs. And the Delaware senator, with his humble working-class origins, is also meant to reassure the "simple folk" that Obama seems to be losing. But the third...

I'M A BIG FAN OF JIMMY CARTER'S. I WAS, AS YOU REMEMBER, HIS NATIONAL CAMPAIGN CHAIRMAN IN 1976, THE FIRST PERSON TO ENDORSE HIM.~ Joe Biden http://www.iptv.org/iowapress/transcript_detail.cfm?ipShowNum=3435&play=true