http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-17188120
28 February 2012 Last updated at 05:24 ET



The next questions are: how long has US intelligence had that information, and why has the Pakistani military been keeping UBL under house arrest, and who else knew about this? How does Stratfor know this level of detail? Want to bet the corporate media doesn't even ask?

A group of Salaafist (Sunni) clerics just declared a fatwa against the minority Shi'ia (Allawite) leadership of the Ba'ath Party regime in Damascus. First, here's the report (from a Sunni paper) and then look at the nice folks we're allied with:




Al-Qaradawi has also described Shi'ites as heretics ("mubtadi'oun". Fellow member of International union of Muslim Scholars, Mohammad Salim Al-Awa criticized Qaradawi for promoting divisions among Muslims. In response, the Iranian Press Agency has described Qaradawi as "a spokesman for “international Freemasonry and rabbis".

Qaradawi accused what he called "heretical" Shias of "invading" Sunni countries.


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Yusuf al-Qaradawi - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Al-Qaradawi has long had a prominent role within the intellectual leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egyptian political organization, but twice (in 1976 ...
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Ali Gomaa, who as the grand mufti (chief Islamic jurist) in Cairo is the senior Sunni Muslim figure in Egypt, was one of the Common Word signatories.
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Rashid al-Ghannushi - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Not to be confused with Mohamed Ghannouchi. ... Religion, Sunni Muslim. Rashid al-Ghannushi or Rached Ghannouchi (Arabic: راشد الغنوشي‎ (born 1941) is a Tunisian Islamist .... "Global Muslim Brotherhood Claims Victory In Tunisia".
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Sh. Haitham al-Haddad Haitham al-Haddad is a London-based Islamic Scholar and Muslim community ...
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London-based radical Muslim cleric Haitham Al-Haddad — who sits on the UK's ... Muslim Brotherhood's Egypt: village evicts 8 Christian families ... London-based cleric Haitham Al-Haddad is a member of the pan-global Sunni organization ...
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Jan 13, 2012 – The Muslim Brotherhood states that its ultimate aim is global Sharia. ... Haitham al-Haddad Claims Women Are Begging Him to Get Stoned ...
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Feb 9, 2012 – During the uprising against the Mubarak regime, a Muslim website published ... al Qaradawi, the highly influential Muslim Brotherhood theologian, in Qatar Saturday. ... Haitham al-Haddad Claims Women Are Begging Him to Get Stoned ... Righteous Sunni Muslim Bombs 32 Shia Rafida to Jahannam · The ...
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5 days ago – Al Qaeda is a spin-off of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, and Egypt & Syria ... are considered by many Sunni to be heretics - i.e. essentially non-Muslim. ... Haitham Al-Haddad is a Muslim scholar who teaches what is the Islam of ...
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managed a stim of $.8T, about 40 percent of the required funding, the drop from 9.1 percent to 8.3 percent got us about a third of the way there.

There are a lot of assumptions there, such as what is the base-line "full employment" figure. If we apply Okun's Law*, unemployment drops one percent for every two percent GDP growth that is sustained for a year. By the same parameter, the natural unemployment rate (due to structural unemployment, not cyclical swings) during the period leading up to the 2008 crash was in the range of about six to seven percent. In the 1950's, that was about four percent, and that illustrates how much the American economy has slowed.

I recall Obama saying early on that unemployment would remain elevated over previous levels. He was right. It looks like the "new normal" is now up to 8% unemployment.
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Google: "full employment six percent"
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Macroeconomics - Google Books Result
books.google.com/books?isbn=0812046196...Jae K. Shim, Joel G. Siegel - 1993 - Business & Economics - 152 pages
Most economists define full employment as meaning that a given percentage of ... an unrealistic goal and needed to be revised to 6 to 7 percent unemployment.
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Survey of Economics - Google Books Result
books.google.com/books?isbn=0324579616...Irvin B. Tucker - 2008 - Business & Economics - 532 pages
Full employment is the situation in which an economy operates at an unemployment rate equal ... In practice, therefore, full employment is difficult to define. ... In the 1980s, the accepted rate was 6 percent, and, currently, the consensus among ...

Okay folks, it's now official - we're allies (again) with Al-Qaeda in yet another religious war in the Mideast/Persian Gulf.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/12/us-syria-zawarhi-idUSTRE81B05320120212



Also, yesterday, came news that the fighting in Syria between Sunnis and Shi'ia has spilled over into neighboring Lebanon. See,
http://news.ph.msn.com/top-stories/article.aspx?cp-documentid=5872590

The Saudis and their allies of convenience in the region are again pushing the U.S. into yet another round of an ongoing and expanding religious war against Shi'ia Iran and its regional allies.

Holy wars aren't something that most Americans understand very well. This isn't just about pro-democracy demonstrators versus bad dictators. Scratch the surface, and one sees the uprising against Assad is rooted in ancient religious difference and clan-based blood vendettas that go back centuries.

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The ruling Syrian Ba'ath Party is predominantly Alawite, a Shi'ia sect, and the civil war continues the "long campaign of terror" by the Sunnis in the 1970s and 1980s against the Assad regime. That bloody revolt, which ended in the 1982 massacre of Sunni rebels in the city of Hama, had its origins in centuries of religious clashes and the many years the Shi'ia minority were a persecuted minority in Syria until a 1964 coup brought the Ba'ath Party, led by the Assad family, into power. See,

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From 1976 to 1982, Sunni Islamists fought the Ba'ath Party-controlled government of Syria in what has been called "long campaign of terror". Islamists attacked ...
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From 1976 to 1982, Sunni Islamists fought the Ba'ath Party-controlled government of Syria in what has been called "long campaign of terror". In 1979 the ...
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The uprising was aimed against the authority of the Ba'ath Party-controlled government of Syria, in what has been called "long campaign of terror". During the ...
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That's the context most of the western media and the pro-regime change propagandists aren't giving the public. Most coverage is entirely one-sided and fails to provide any historical context that might explain why the Syrians are killing each other. The escalating civil war in Syria is essentially part of an expanding regional religious war, and the west is being pushed into the middle of it by powerful, wealthy interests and a massive propaganda blitz. Enemy of my enemy . . . this stuff goes back millenia, and we're being played into taking sides, yet again.

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The "raining sarcasm" icon often seems too blunt a tool. We need a smiley more suitable for irony.

Maybe a gallows humor toon. Maybe several.