THE BLACKBURN REPORT

News and Opinion Based on Facts

Thursday, May 10, 2018

Iran “crossed a red line” when it attacked Israel




Take out the mullahs with some missiles and carpet bomb their airfields.
The Persian people hate the mullahs as much as we do.
 Destroying the dictatorship would be a blessing..mfbsr
Iran “crossed a red line” when it attacked Israel directly from Syria, Netanyahu stated, warning Assad that “whoever hurts us, we will hurt them sevenfold.”

In a warning directed especially at Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stressed in a Hebrew-language video message Thursday that the IDF will respond powerfully to any attacks on Israeli territory.
Shortly after midnight Wednesday, IDF defense systems identified approximately 20 rockets that the Iranian Quds forces had launched at IDF forward posts on the Golan Heights. The majority of the rockets missed their mark and fell in Syria territory, while four were intercepted by the Iron Dome missile defense system.
Carried out from Iranian military bases in Syria, it was the first direct Iranian attack on Israel rather than through its proxies.
The assault prompted an extensive Israel Air Force attack on dozens of Iranian targets in Syria. Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman said that Israel’s forces struck “nearly all the Iranian infrastructure in Syria.”
In his first comments since the missile attack, Netanyahu, speaking at IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv, said that “Iran crossed a red line. We responded accordingly. The IDF carried out a very wide-ranging attack against Iranian targets in Syria.
“Thanks to a correct deployment of our forces both offensively and defensively, the Iranian action failed. No rocket landed in Israeli territory and our policy is clear: We will not allow Iran to establish a military presence in Syria,” he stated.
“Yesterday I delivered a clear message to the Assad regime: Our action is directed against Iranian targets in Syria; however, if the Syrian military acts against us, we will act against it. This is exactly what happened yesterday – Syrian military batteries fired surface-to-air missiles against us and, therefore, we attacked them.
“The international community needs to prevent the Iranian Al-Quds force from establishing itself in Syria. We need to unite in order to cut off its spreading tentacles of evil there and everywhere,” the prime minister added.
“I repeat: Whoever hurts us – we will hurt them sevenfold, and whoever is preparing to hurt us – we will act to hit them first. This is what we have done and this is what we will continue to do,” he asserted.
By: World Israel News Staff

Monday, May 7, 2018

trump Inherited This Economy from Obama.



 President Donald Trump relentlessly congratulates himself for the healthy state of the U.S. economy, with its steady growth, low unemployment, busier factories and confident consumers.

But in the year since Trump’s inauguration, most analysts tend to agree on this: The economy remains the one he inherited from Barack Obama.

Growth has picked up, but it’s not yet clear if it can sustain a faster expansion. Hiring and wage growth actually slowed slightly from Obama’s last year in office. Consumers and businesses are much more optimistic, but their spending has yet to move meaningfully higher.

“I don’t see any noticeable break over the past year,” said Michael Strain, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “We tend to overstate the degree to which the president has the ability to control the economy.”

The U.S. public appears to have a similar view, according to a Quinnipiac University poll last week. It found that two-thirds of American voters say the economy is “excellent” or “good,” the highest since the poll started asking about the economy in 2001.

Yet 49 percent of respondents credited Obama for the economy’s health, compared with 40 percent who credited Trump.

Trump’s successful push for income and corporate tax cuts and his steps to loosen regulations have helped drive a surging stock market rally fueled by the prospect of higher corporate profits. And most economists are optimistic that growth will continue at a solid pace this year.

“We have created more than 2 million new jobs since the election,” Trump said last week in Nashville, Tennessee. “Economic growth has surged past 3 percent, something that wasn’t supposed to happen for a long time. We’re way ahead of schedule. Unemployment is at a 17-year low.”

Those trends aren’t very different from what came before. Employers added more jobs in Obama’s last year in office — 2.2 million in 2016 — and nearly 3 million in 2014. Economic growth did top 3 percent at an annual rate during the second and third quarters of 2017. But it had surged above 4 percent in the second and third quarters of 2014.


The unemployment rate fell from 4.8 percent when Trump took office to 4.1 percent now. It fell by the same amount or more in 2013, 2014 and 2015.

During the presidential campaign, Trump portrayed the economy as floundering and called the unemployment rate “one of the biggest hoaxes in modern politics.” Now he accepts the government’s data at face value.

When the government reports growth for the October-December quarter next week, it may show the economy expanded at a 3 percent or higher annual rate for the third straight quarter. That could lift growth in 2017 to the fastest pace since it reached 2.9 percent in 2015.

Some of that growth may reflect greater spending by consumers or businesses in anticipation of tax cuts. But most economists expect it will take time for Trump’s deregulatory and tax policies to have their full effect.

There’s no question that businesses and consumers are more optimistic. The Conference Board’s consumer confidence index jumped to a 17-year high in November before slipping a bit last month.

That hasn’t yet resulted in more Americans opening their wallets, though. Spending growth in the first nine months of 2017 was slightly slower than in the previous year.

Some economists are growing skeptical of consumer sentiment surveys because the responses seem increasingly skewed by political leanings. People in counties that voted for Trump reported a much brighter outlook on the economy after the election than did people in Clinton counties, according to a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

People in Trump-voting counties were much more likely just after the election to say their financial situation had improved in the past year, the New York Fed said, long before any of Trump’s policies were in place. But the change in sentiment didn’t produce changes in consumer spending, the report said.

“It does somewhat undermine the message from the confidence surveys,” said Jim O’Sullivan, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics.

American companies have stepped up their investments in machinery, software, and office towers this year after sluggish spending in 2015 and 2016. Such spending increased about 6.2 percent at an annual rate in the first nine months of the year.


In both cases, rising oil prices played an outsized role in spurring more corporate spending. When oil prices increase, drilling firms tend to buy more steel pipe and other goods that are used in drilling rigs.

Dean Baker, an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, points out that when mining and oil and gas are excluded, investment spending has increased an anemic 3.3 percent this year.

Many economists expect growth to perk up in 2018, with the impact of tax cuts and the Trump administration’s deregulatory efforts spurring corporate investment and consumer spending. So far, 15 regulations that were put in place by the Obama administration have been overturned by Congress. The administration has put dozens of others on hold.

Manufacturing executives appear highly optimistic and welcome the attention Trump has lavished on their industry. Factories added 196,000 jobs last year after shedding workers in 2016. Still, manufacturing added 208,000 in 2014 and 207,000 in 2011.

And most of the jobs that have been added this year were outside the Midwestern “Rust Belt” states that swung for Trump in the election. Instead, some of the states with the biggest gains are in the South, Southwest and Northwest.


Meanwhile, Michigan’s manufacturing employment was flat last year, while factory jobs rose just 0.5 percent in Ohio. Pennsylvania lost manufacturing jobs.

Fiat Chrysler said last week that it is moving production of some pickup trucks from Mexico to a factory in Warren, Michigan, near Detroit, which will be expanded. The move will employ 2,500 people. And Toyota and Mazda said they will build a factory in Huntsville, Alabama, that will add 4,000 jobs.

At the same time, 215 more workers were laid off last week at the Carrier Corp. factory in Indianapolis where Trump touted a deal early in his presidency that prevented the plant’s closure.

“There are still jobs headed overseas, no question about it,” Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, said. “You can’t tweet jobs back into existence.”

  | The Associated Press






Wednesday, February 28, 2018

Sign the petition: Defend Robert Mueller’s Investigation

Sign the petition: Defend Robert Mueller’s Investigation: The American people deserve the whole truth on whether Donald Trump’s presidential campaign colluded with Russia.
All facts need to come to light and we must not let partisanship stand in the way of judicial independence.
Special prosecutor Robert Mueller must be allowed to continue his nonpartisan investigation and must be allowed to retain his independence.

SIGN HERE:


first name


last name


Email address


zip code
Please leave this field blank:


ADD YOUR NAME!


Problems signing? Let us know here!

.petition-text p {font-size:125%;margin-bottom:15px;}

Tuesday, February 27, 2018

America's Cowardly President


trump dodged the draft five times.

This shameless coward today said if he'd been at the Florida
school shooting he'd have run into the building unarmed.
trump has never shown ANY courage in his life.
This coward said John McCain wasn't a hero, although McCain fought for his country while trump partied with Daddy's money.
We'll see. Maybe he will fight off his fellow inmates once he goes to prison.
But I predict he
 won't.

mfbsr



Saturday, February 24, 2018

I Know I'm Not the Only One

They say you got to pay your dues if you want to sing the blues.
Sam Smith has paid his dues!
If you aren't familiar with this artist, do yourself a favor and listen to this heart wrenching song.