From The Los Angeles Times comes the story, U.S. does not believe Iran is trying to build nuclear bomb.

For now, U.S. military and intelligence officials say they don’t believe Iran’s leadership has made the decision to build a bomb.

“I think they are keeping themselves in a position to make that decision,” James R. Clapper Jr., director of National Intelligence, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Feb. 16. “But there are certain things they have not yet done and have not done for some time.”

Clapper and CIA Director David H. Petraeus told a separate Senate hearing that Iran was enriching uranium below 20% purity. Uranium is considered weapons grade when it is enriched to about 90% purity, although it is still potentially usable at lower enrichment levels.

U.S. spy agencies also have not seen evidence of a decision-making structure on nuclear weapons around Khamenei, said David Albright, who heads the nonprofit Institute for Science and International Security and is an expert on Iran’s nuclear program.

Albright’s group estimates that with the centrifuges Iran already has, it could enrich uranium to sufficient purity to make a bomb in as little as six months, should it decide to do so.

It is not known precisely what other technical hurdles Iran would have to overcome, but Albright and many other experts believe that if it decides to proceed, the country has the scientific knowledge to design and build a crude working bomb in as little as a year. It would take as long as three years, Albright estimated, for Iran to build a warhead small enough to fit on a ballistic missile.

Albright said a push by Iran to build a nuclear weapon probably would be detected.

The story also covers some dissenters from the conclusions of the U.S. Spy agencies.  As far as I can see, the evidence the dissenters use is, “Evidence? We don’t need no stinking evidence!”

This pertains only to Sturbridge.

Tom Creamer’s blog post is actually titled just, Revoking the Community Preservation Act. His blog post demonstrates that revoking the CPA cannot lower the local tax burden, but it could raise it.

I’ll just quote part of his third paragraph.

…it is not a CPA spending crisis that is facing the Town of Sturbridge, but rather a town-wide borrowing crisis brought on by all too many projects being approved at Town Meeting by the Legislative Branch of government – those residents (approximately 4.5%) who vote Town Meeting – of which I am one.

In a later paragraph, he states the effect of revoking the CPA:

…but the fact remains that the tax burden will not lessen, as the current debt does not simply disappear, nor does it prevent any further spending or borrowing by revoking it. Again, it merely eliminates a source of potential funding from the state.

Can it be any more blunt?  Revoking the CPA will make matters worse as far as tax burden goes if we keep adding projects at Town Meeting.  There is nothing we can do to reduce the tax burden already agreed to by previous Town Meetings.  We can lessen the future increases in tax burden only by what the town decides to do in future Town Meetings.

I have taken these paragraphs from Tom’s post to highlight because I believe these paragraphs cut to the heart of what he is saying.  Tom has a style that I enjoy when he writes.  However, that style might lead you to the wrong conclusion as to the point he is making if you read only the first few paragraphs.  If you read the whole thing, I think you will see that I have fairly represented the point his post makes.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, has a web page, Republicans are blocking cameras from tomorrow’s women’s health care hearing. Tell them to stop censoring women!, where you can sign a petition to the House of Representatives.

I have some questions and conjectures.

Why do they call these things hearings if they don’t want people to hear?

What could this one woman say that has the Republicans so frightened?

Wouldn’t you like to find out?

Maybe she has something important to say that they haven’t already considered.

Maybe she will tell them that some women need to take these pills for health reasons having nothing to do with contraception.  Should these women be sick, so the Republicans can feel …?

What do you suppose House Republicans feel, if they feel anything at all?

According to the article GOP lawmaker: ‘Radicalized’ Girl Scouts ‘sexualizing’ recruits,

Republican state Rep. Bob Morris on Saturday sent a letter (PDF) to his fellow House Republicans explaining …

“As members of the Indiana House of Representatives, we must be wise before we use the credibility and respect of the ‘Peoples’ House’ to extend legitimacy to a radicalized organization,” he added. “I challenge each of you to examine these matters more closely before you extend your name and your reputation to endorse a group that has been subverted in the name of liberal progressive politics and the destruction of traditional American family values.”

So why is it that Sturbridge Stop & Shop will allow the Girl Scouts to peddle their cookies in front of the store, but they won’t let us collect signatures for Elizabeth Warren?  Elizabeth Warren isn’t nearly as radical as the Girl Scouts according to this Republican Indiana House member.

Why do they call it a hearing when they have no intention of hearing anything but their own echo? Maybe it should be called a tirading instead of a hearing.

If you wait for the punchline of the video, you will see why the committee needed to hear this exact testimony. It would have explained to them something that they had forgotten to consider. What if choosing the laws to ignore based on your moral beliefs interferes with another person’s ability to stay healthy?

On the MoveOn web site, they explain The Powerful Testimony The GOP Doesn’t Want You To Hear.

Today, an all male ‘witness’ panel was allowed to speak at the GOP’s hearing examining the Obama administration’s new regulation requiring employers and insurers to provide contraception coverage to employees. When Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke was presented to testify on behalf of the Minority, she was shown the door. She would have been the only female voice speaking on behalf of the millions of women who support access to birth control. Here is the basis of her testimony, had she been allowed to speak.

The Nation Of Change article, The Lord High Almighty Pooh-Bah of Threats. The Grand Ayatollah of Nuclear Menace, presents some of the best arguments against our current fixation with Iranian nuclear ambitions.  The article contains quite a number of quotes from the band of hysteria organizers that indicate what they really think.  I have chosen just one of them for a teaser.

The neo-conservative thinking (and Barack Obama can be regarded as often being a fellow traveler of such) is even more charming than that. Listen to Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at America’s most prominent neo-con think tank, American Enterprise Institute:

The biggest problem for the United States is not Iran getting a nuclear weapon and testing it, it’s Iran getting a nuclear weapon and not using it. Because the second that they have one and they don’t do anything bad, all of the naysayers are going to come back and say, “See, we told you Iran is a responsible power. We told you Iran wasn’t getting nuclear weapons in order to use them immediately.” … And they will eventually define Iran with nuclear weapons as not a problem.

The question of what would Iran do with a nuclear weapon if it had one may be the best antidote for our current hysteria.

Even I think some of the article may be over the top, but even those parts give you food for thought.

The article Occupy Wall Street Calls for May Day General Strike has an approved message from the Occupy Wall Street General Assembly, New York, New York.

May Day 2012 Occupy Wall Street stands in solidarity with the calls for a day without the 99%, a general strike and more!! On May Day, wherever you are, we are calling for: *No Work *No School *No Housework *No Shopping *No Banking TAKE THE STREETS!!!!!

I hope this will signal a great re-awakening of the movement’s public face.  Will the people accept President Obama’s appointment of 50 investigators of bank fraud when we need 70,000 investigators (see Is Obama Getting Serious About Bank Fraud?), or will we take to the streets in protest?

Here is a Real News interview with the prime expert in detection in this area of fraud. The underlying question is in the subtitle, Bill Black: Are Pres. Obama’s new measures effective or window dressing?

It is still true what Bill Black has been saying for years, this bank collapse is 70 times bigger than the S & L crisis and the President has assigned 55 agents whereas the S & L crisis had 1,000 agents trained by Bill Black. So the President has assigned 55 agents to a task that could conceivably require 70,000 agents. This would be laughable if it weren’t so corrupt.

The so-called robo-signing involved the felony filing of false affidavits by the large mortgage servicers at a rate of 10,000 times per month, or over 100,000 times per year.

You’d think with hundreds of thousands of violations, there could be at least a few prosecutions. There are more prosecutions of stealing cars than there are of stealing houses.

I have tried to explain the concept of this rebuttal ad to the Elizabeth Warren campaign to no avail. I finally decided to make a prototype of the ad that I had in mind.

If the campaign still refuses to counter the attack that will not go away, maybe this prototype can go viral and make up for what they refuse to do. Its going viral depends on you sharing it and recommending it to anyone you know.  Either share this blog post or share the video at YouTube.

The voice artist that is standing in for Elizabeth Warren for the explanation of the intellectual foundation is Shelah Jordan.

For more on the real Elizabeth Warren and the two books that were mentioned, see the videos in the list below.

• The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class
• The Heart Of The Two Income Trap
• Elizabeth Warren – The Two Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke

JaneS sent me a link to a Plymouth Daily News article, Running for President in 2016 instead of for Senator in 2012. I derived the headline for this post from the wording in the link to the article. [Actually it was the link on the front page of the newpaper that said 2012 Brown vs Warren race starting to look like the 2010 Brown vs Coakley shocker. I never noticed that my titled did match the actual title of the article. I also did not even look at the picture at the top of the article before I titled this post.][When I go back to the newspaper’s front page, I don’t even see the title that I thought belonged to the article. The link has a popup title when you hover over it that says Is she running for President in 2016 instead of for Senator in 2012. Of course that may change by the time you get to the article.]

To give you just a flavor of the devastating article, I will include the teaser below:

I have spoken to local town committee chairs who are so put-off by the Warren staff that they are sitting out her campaign and spending their time working “for people I like,” as one put it to me.

The Warren campaign staff gets paid. Local town chairs and activists work for free. No one works for free for someone unless they like them, and that ain’t happening here for Elizabeth Warren.

Here’s what the Warren staff asked unpaid Cape Cod Democratic Town Committees to do last week in 20-degree weather:

• Canvass neighborhoods in Bourne, Mashpee, Hyannis, Yarmouth and Dennis that have a large number of registered voters that did not vote in the 2010 election to discuss the importance of the 2012 election cycle.
• Collect nomination signatures to get Elizabeth Warren and other participating local Democrats on the ballot (if you choose).
• Distribute literature for Elizabeth and answer questions these voters may have about the 2012 election.

Canvassing door to door may work in urban areas, but it is anathema in the boonies where older and more affluent voters live.

I am amazed at how the newspaper article fits right in with my own experience.

I had to think about it for a while to figure out the logic of the actual headline on the article. Is it Warren that is actually running for President in 2016 rather than Senator in 2012? If so, she could do us all a favor by getting out and throwing her support to Marisa DeFranco.

Or could it be Deval Patrick who will run for President in 2016 using the Elizabeth Warren message that never got out?

2012/02/20 update

Via Facebook, I have been corresponding with a person familiar with the Warren campaign and received some information that helps put The Plymouth Daily News article in perspective.

In his message, he said,

…My own view of it is that all polls should be taken seriously, even if you think they are crap. The key message here is that nothing is certain. If we fight as though it is true, we will win by 10 points more, even if it isn’t true.

Now for the positive news. The Poll is crap. It was filled with leading questions, (eg: “Do you think Scott Brown is a leader”, “Do you think ELizabeth warren is a radical intellectual”) run by a Pollster who is very close to Mitt Romney. It did not account for the fact that still 30% of the MA population (including many Democrats) doesn’t know who Elizabeth Warren is. A poll a few days earlier took exactly this iinto account and yielded a lead for Warren in a statistical tie. However, despite all that, the Poll represents something even if it is not predictive. Since no Polls at this stage of an election are really predictive, it is what it is and we circle back to the fact that I think all polls carry some useful insight.