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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Pejman Yousefzadeh and Kevin Holtsberry are joined by Ken Ballen to discuss his book Terrorists in Love: The Real Lives of Islamic Radicals, which provides case studies of individual extremists, their life histories, and their personal perspectives, in the context of showing how the United States can better understand the Islamic world.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

Buy Terrorists in Love: The Real Lives of Islamic Radicals on Amazon
Terrorists in Love
TerrorFreeTomorrow.org

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The hosts and guests of Coffee and Markets speak only for ourselves, not any clients or employers.

GOP candidates for President took another night out of their schedules to get smeared by smug liberal journalists. The low-point of the night was when Charlie Rose and JournOlister Karen Tumulty used a 30 second clip of Ronald Reagan to suggest that the Gipper was all about raising taxes in the interest of compromise. The high-point was the fact that the debate was broadcast on BloombergTV, so no one saw it. Breitbart-opolis reactions here and here.

Why is Obama heartbroken over the NBA delay?

President Obama said Tuesday that he’s “a little heartbroken that the NBA season is getting delayed” at a fundraiser in Orlando with Magic star Dwight Howard.

Because he took a shot in Washington. Can you say REJECTED?

United against Barack Obama, Senate Republicans voted Tuesday night to kill the jobs package the president had spent weeks campaigning for across the country, a stinging loss at the hands of lawmakers opposed to stimulus-style spending and a tax increase on the very wealthy.

Meanwhile, economies struggle worldwide – the latest from Britain. But, hey, it’s in the game, right?

The number of people unemployed in Britain jumped to 2.57 million in the three months to August, the highest amount since 1994, official data showed on Wednesday.

(more…)

From Fox News:

Rep. Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, sent a subpoena Wednesday to Attorney General Eric Holder as part of his investigation into the gun trafficking operation known as “Fast and Furious.”

“Top Justice Department officials, including Attorney General Holder, know more about Operation Fast and Furious than they have publicly acknowledged,” the California Republican said in a statement. “The documents this subpoena demands will provide answers to questions that Justice officials have tried to avoid since this investigation began eight months ago. It’s time we know the whole truth.” (more…)

Over twenty people were arrested in Chicago Monday by groups claiming to be affiliated indirectly with the #Occupy movement. The tactics are reminiscent of those used in the past by radical union employed community organizer Lisa Fithian, who was in Chcago doing ‘training’ for the past few days.

We introduced you to radical anarchist organizer Lisa Fithian a couple of days ago and  warned that when Lisa comes to town, chaos and arrest soon follow. Then Breitbart.TV showed you that Lisa Fitihian was in Chicago and making a speech to a crowd of #Occupy Everything chanting zombies.

Look what happened in Chicago yesterday.

According to Reuters…

On Tuesday, 16 people were arrested at a protest at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Chicago where the annual conference of the Mortgage Bankers Association was underway, the Chicago Police spokesman said.

The people arrested at the conference were facing charges of misdemeanor trespassing, he said.

Separately, five women aged 55 to 80 from the Action Now group were also arrested after they took garbage from a foreclosed home owned by Bank of America Corp and dumped it in one of the bank’s branches, the group’s website said.

These protests, which cost cities like Chicago a tremendous amount in both time and resources, was organized by a group called “Stand Up Chicago”.

(more…)

The mainstream media is knocking itself out making comparisons between the Occupy Wall Street protests and the tea party movement. For years, the left has tried to find a left-wing equivalent to the tea party movement without success. Remember the Coffee Party? I didn’t think so.

The protesters in Manhattan and the tea party are 180 degrees apart. This rag-tag group of unwashed, middle-class socialists protesting against corporations and the rich don’t really know why they’re protesting. They just know they want something for free.  Lots of free stuff to everyone, except to the wealthy who produce the free stuff, is what the protesters want.

The Occupy Wall Street protesters represent perfectly what liberals, such as Nancy Pelosi, initially labeled the tea party movement in 2009. Pelosi tried to halt the rapid spread of the grass-roots tea party by suggesting it was controlled by the Republican Party and calling it “astro-turf.” That failed as people recognized that the Republican Party is not capable of creating anything with the brilliance of the tea party movement. The Occupy Wall Street protesters are another matter. The strings controlling it run directly to the labor unions and the White House. Obama political advisor Patrick Gaspard, who has worked closely with the ACORN-controlled Working Families Party and the largest local within the Service Employees International Union, has actually advertised on Craigslist to pay protesters to join in the fun taking place in Manhattan. Don’t expect any reporting of this from the mainstream media! They are too busy trying to compare the incomparable Occupy Wall Street to American patriots in the tea party movement.

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From CBSNews:

Colchicine has been used to treat gout and other inflammatory conditions for thousands of years. How could one company gain a monopoly?

There are about 1,000 medications on the market that predate the existence of the Food and Drug Administration and therefore were never approved. FDA official Deborah Autor spoke to CBS News as head of the office of unapproved drugs. “Well, for me, unapproved drugs present current risks,” Autor said. “We don’t know what’s in them. We don’t know if they’re going to work properly. We don’t know how they’re made and that’s a real concern.”

Hundreds of thousands of people take Colchicine each year. The FDA said over the past 40 years, 169 deaths have been linked to the medication. A company called URL Pharma decided it would take the ancient drug, sold for 10 cents a pill, and test it as part of an FDA program to either approve these drugs or get them off the market.

“One company chose to seek FDA approval and they spent tens of millions of dollars in order to present data necessary for that approval and in the process, there were some important things that came out of the approval process,” Autor said. “We discovered a lot of people were being excessively dosed with Colchicine.”

(more…)

Until now many of the often-illegal antics perpetuated by several individual protesters from Wisconsin seemed to be random acts committed by disillusioned agitators. But we have learned that these acts have been highly orchestrated and perpetuated by a group whose members are told to deny their involvement in the group. A group, we’ve discovered, which is financed by Big Labor.

With that funding comes clout. They have shared the stage with Deomcratic Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin, a candidate for US Senate. They’ve hosted prominent Democratic legislative speakers such as Wisconsin State Representative Cory Mason and Minority Leader Peter Barca.

These protesters have played a key role in many of the most visible events in and around the State Capitol since February. This week, their organization was listed alongside the Democratic Party of Wisconsin and United Wisconsin as key organizers behind the recall of Governor Scott Walker.

(more…)

On October 11, 2011, Attorney General Eric Holder held a press conference to announce that FBI and DEA agents had stopped an Iranian plan to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the U.S.  The men behind the plot were “Manssor Arbab Arbabsiar and Gholam Shakuri.” And of these two, only Arbabsiar has been arrested.

The plot became known when Arbabsiar traveled to “Reynosa, Mexico, across the border from McAllen, Texas, and negotiated a $1.5 million payment for the assassination of the Saudi ambassador.”

Unbeknownst to Arbabsiar, the contact he made in Mexico was a DEA informant. And soon thereafter, with the help of the FBI, the DEA office in Houston launched an investigation that appears now to have ended successfully.

It’s important to note there were also bombing plots allegedly associated with these plans. Thus the criminal complaint filed against Arbabsair and Shakuri accused “the men of conspiracy to murder a foreign official; conspiracy to engage in foreign travel and use interstate and foreign commerce facilities in the commission of murder-for-hire; conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction: specifically explosives; and conspiracy to commit an act of international terrorism.”

Ironically, during his press conference on these things, after Holder said  the plot was “conceived, sponsored and was directed from Iran,” he actually had the gall to describe crossing international borders to plan and execute crimes as a “flagrant” violation of U.S. and international law.

When he used the word “flagrant,” a few questions arose in my mind:

Was he describing a flagrant violation similar to selling 2,500 weapons to straw purchasers who were going to knowingly pass them to criminals?

Or was he talking about a flagrant violation like we’ve witnessed via the smuggling of those weapons across an international border via gun walking?

Or did he mean flagrant as in the flagrant cover-up of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry’s murder with Fast and Furious weapons?

I am just so confused.

(more…)

When I introduced the concept of regime uncertainty in 1997, attempting to improve our understanding of the Great Depression’s extraordinary duration, I anticipated that many people—especially my fellow economists—would not welcome this contribution. Their primary objection, I ventured, would be that the concept remained too vague and, most of all, that it had not been reduced to a quantitative index of the sort that modern mainstream economists customarily work with, especially in their empirical macroeconomic analyses.

My argument did not lack evidence, however, and I regarded the agreement of several different forms of evidence as an important element of the argument’s force. The evidence I adduced with regard to changes in the yield spreads for high-grade corporate bonds of differing maturities seemed to me both systematic and especially compelling, though not decisive because alternative explanations of those changes might be offered. (I considered several such explanations and rejected them as unpersuasive in one way or another.) Recently, in my application of the concept of regime uncertainty to help us understand better the persistent economic troubles since 2007, I again advanced several different kinds of evidence, including as before an analysis of changes in the yield curves for high-grade corporate bonds. This time, too, the evidence is consistent with the underlying argument.

Nevertheless, the argument scarcely gained widespread assent, and most analysts either ignored it completely or, like Paul Krugman, dismissed it as a fairy tale—in his view, the sort of wholly fictitious notion that would be peddled only by think-tank whores in the pay of Republican plutocrats. (I trust that everyone who knows me will see how closely I fit this template.)

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Today, in 196o, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev pounded his shoe on a desk at the United Nations. Look for Iran to do something similar soon.

In the world of Twitter, YouTube, and the 24/7 news cycle, these debates bear a much closer resemblance to a baseball season than to prize fights.  In other words, consistency is key and you can’t win it all in one night.  There are only two people who demonstrate consistency night-in and night-out, and that’s Mitt Romney and Ron Paul.

Paul is consistent only in the sense that he seems to be incapable of thinking clearly and wastes time that we could be spending getting to know the next GOP nominee.  And he’s 76-years-old.  The only reason you don’t know that fact is because none of his opponents are threatened by his candidacy enough to point it out.

Our only rock-steady debater is Mitt.  Though he’s rarely inspiring, he simply doesn’t give a bad answer and has a thoughtful response to every challenge.  Not only can he take a punch, he’s the only candidate who gets himself up for every go-round and is eager to engage.  Compare that with Rick Perry—clearly a good man and an effective Governor—who has done nothing in the past eight weeks to demonstrate that he could make his high school debate team, much less go toe to toe with Obama and then the world.  Tonight was the night where the giant Vaudeville cane should have come out to pull him off stage.

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From the Associated Press:

United against Barack Obama, Senate Republicans voted Tuesday night to kill the jobs package the president had spent weeks campaigning for across the country, a stinging loss at the hands of lawmakers opposed to stimulus-style spending and a tax increase on the very wealthy.

Forty-six Republicans joined with two Democrats to filibuster the $447 billion plan. Fifty Democrats had voted for it, but the vote was not final. The roll call was kept open to allow Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H. to vote. The likely 51-48 eventual tally would be far short of the 60 votes needed to keep the bill alive in the 100-member Senate.

(more…)

Bloomberg and The Washington Post are scheduled to start trying to smear the candidates at 8pm EDT. Whomever “wins,” the GOP has already lost by allowing their enemies in the press to vet their candidates. Will the other candidates (and the moderators, of course) try to “finish off” Rick Perry or shift their attention to the surging Herman Cain? Will Romney or Cain ever criticize each other? Will Ron Paul still look at Iran and say, “meh, live and let live”?

(more…)

With Herman Cain grabbing top headlines at The Drudge Report and Gallup reporting that he has statistically tied Mitt Romney for the GOP nomination, the question is whether the math-genius-turned-businessman can really become the Godfather of America’s political system. Some smart new research says Cain can win the general — people have an open mind about him — but he needs to close the sale with those uncertain swing voters.

What was once seen as a second-tier candidacy has been catching fire. From 9-9-9 to that Florida straw poll, Mr. Cain has been building momentum. Now, a firm has created a clever experiment to figure out if he can really do well beyond the small purview of committed GOP primary activists. Evolving Strategies allowed respondents to view several key clips and overlaid a behavior game that allowed people to donate or take away money from a candidate. According to the group, it’s the first to have real information on how electable Cain is with the general audience.

Good news for Herman Cain supporters: he’s tested quite well.

(more…)

The Internet hacker collective known as Anonymous may be on a political collision course with the #Occupy movement that it helped launch.

The anarchist, anti-authoritarian nature of Anonymous could soon place it at odds with the #OccupyWallStreet protestors, many of whom pine for a “pure” democracy in which a consensus (not a majority) defines the rules.

That clash becomes more likely as #OccupyWallStreet begins taking marching orders (literally) from Big Labor, the Democratic Party, and the institutional left.

Recently, for example, a faction of Anonymous recently told MoveOn.org to “f#@ off” (language warning):

To understand the dynamic between Anonymous and #Occupy, it is necessary to examine the history of both. (more…)

My fellow Americans–and, I suppose, Canadians:

I regret to inform you that you are not the “99 Percent.”

The 99 Percent dislikes big banks, but also dislikes big government–and big messes.

The 99 Percent does not occupy property it does not own, public or private.

The 99 Percent does not steal from local businesses, does not attack police officers, does not storm national museums, and does not defecate in public.

Flyer at #OccupyWallStreet - the address for donations is a small building in Washington, DC shared by Code Pink and other "progressive" organizations

The 99 Percent does not rank people’s views based on their skin color, gender, or socioeconomic status.

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From AgWeek:

WASHINGTON — Despite his earlier statements that the Obama administration would let Congress write the next farm bill, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack commented Oct. 3 and 4 on several sections of the bill…

…Vilsack said in the interview he is reluctant to cut the food stamp program, saying that its budget authority already was reduced to pay for teacher salaries and to make settlements for farmers who had sued USDA for discrimination in the Pigford II case.

(more…)

From AFP:

US agents have foiled what has been called a “significant terrorist act” linked to Iran which called for the assassination of the Saudi US ambassador and other attacks, ABC News reported Tuesday.

The Justice Department scheduled an announcement at 1800 GMT on what it called “significant national security enforcement action.”

ABC said the plot included the assassination of the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States, with a bomb and subsequent bomb attacks on the Saudi and Israeli embassies in Washington.

(more…)

It’s all about the Benjamins, baby!

Occupy Wall Street protesters asked “Wall Street banker” James O’Keefe for capital investing yesterday. They wanted funding for the “Constitutional World Federation” they are planning. Another protester goes into detail about funding for the Occupy Wall Street protest came from Almagamated Bank. They’re all for capitalism, but only if it benefits them.

James O’Keefe scores another win against the hypocritical left.
Via Project Veritas: