Nigel Farage on “wholesale, violent revolution” in Europe… “When the next phase of the disaster comes, they will come for you”

Nigel Farage spoke at the Sovereign Man: Offshore Tactics Workshop in Santiago, Chile, on March 30 – April 1, 2013.

Stocks to watch: Tesla to remain in focus Monday

By Sue Chang, MarketWatch

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Tesla Motors Inc. is likely to remain in focus on Monday after surging 41% this week, its best weekly performance since it went public in 2010.

The electric-car maker reported its first quarterly profit ever on Wednesday, helping the stock soar to record levels.

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Week ahead: Retailers in focus

Next week's economic calendar includes retails sales and retailer earnings reports, plus possible Android news from Google. Polya Lesova joins MoneyBeat. Photo: Getty Images.

Amid all the euphoria over Tesla’s TSLA +10.61%  stellar results, some analysts cautioned that there are still speed bumps ahead.

“To date, Tesla’s strong performance has been a function of its impressive factory ramp and marketing plan, but also two years of pent-up demand and the sale of lucrative ZEV [zero-emission-vehicle] credits,” Ben Schuman, an analyst at Pacific Crest, wrote in a note on Thursday.

“Going forward, the company needs to ramp to 25% gross margins from 5% (excluding ZEV credits) and demonstrate sustainable demand. This can be done, but we do not think the current valuation adequately reflects execution risk.”

Separately, Post Holdings Inc. POST +3.24% , the maker of Honey Bunches of Oats, Pebbles and Grape Nuts, is expected to report on Monday second-quarter earnings of 27 cents a share, according to a consensus survey by FactSet. The cereal maker was spun off from Ralcorp Holdings Inc. last year.

On Monday after the market close, Take-Two Interactive Software Inc. TTWO +2.81%  is likely to post fourth-quarter earnings of 23 cents a share.

Anwar backs Azmin on Khalid’s MB job, says must have consensus

By Syed Jaymal Zahiid

KUALA LUMPUR, May 11 – Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim appeared to have backed his confidant Azmin Ali in calling for a consultation process for the Selangor mentri besar post after the latter claimed Tan Sri Abdul Khalid Ibrahim’s candidacy had bypassed the democratic process.
The PKR advisor also appeared to have suggested that the party were considering removing Abdul Khalid when he told Sinar Harian that the consultation should include discussions on other possible candidates for the job.
“I have no problem with Tan Sri Khalid. But the problem is... there is no problem but there should be consultation. Are there other names? New faces? Do we continue?” Sinar Harian quoted him as saying.
Anwar (picture), however, added that they will solve the debacle within these few days.
The tussle over the mentri besar post has pushed PKR into a leadership crisis with its deputy president now openly accusing the party of “nepotism” when he alleged it had bypassed the consultation process in picking Abdul Khalid for the job.
Azmin also appeared to question Abdul Khalid’s leadership at a press conference yesterday, and said he was seeking a meeting with PKR’s national leaders for a consensus decision to be made on who gets to be the new Selangor MB.
The debacle has sparked talk that Azmin, who is also said to be vying for the position, would leave PKR following the party’s supposed endorsement of Abdul Khalid’s governance.
Azmin dismissed the speculation at yesterday’s press conference where he was flanked by some of the party’s Selangor line-up in what appeared to be a sign of protest against Abdul Khalid’s likely reappointment as the state’s chief executive.
Although the Bukit Antarabangsa assemblyman was evasive when bombarded by questions for his view on the candidacy for the post, the PKR deputy president made several insinuations that leaders from the party’s Selangor chapter were against Abdul Khalid’s reappointment.
However, a majority of Selangor PKR lawmakers and division chiefs want Abdul Khalid to be reappointed as the state’s mentri besar, party sources have said, amid protests by a faction led by Azmin.
The Malaysian Insider understands the endorsement was made at a closed-door “gathering” held at Empire Hotel in Subang Jaya on Monday where most of the 14 state assemblymen, 16 division chiefs and a few federal MPs who attended felt that Abdul Khalid should be allowed to lead the PR Selangor government for a second term.
The two other Pakatan Rakyat component parties, the DAP and PAS, have also backed Abdul Khalid for the job despite winning more seats than PKR in Selangor.
The DAP and PAS each won 15 seats in Selangor at the May 5 general election, with PKR netting 14.

EU referendum: The solution to this EU mess lies in Article 50

Our politicians need to tackle the fundamental problem at the heart of our membership

 
The solution lies here: Prime Minister Gordon Brown signing the Lisbon Treaty at the Museu dos Coches in 2007

In all the brouhaha over a Euro-referendum unleashed in the wake of that surge in the polls by Ukip, it is hard to know who is talking the emptiest fluff. We really are paying the price for all those years when our politicians and media were so keen to bury our European system of government out of sight that they have little idea of the harsh realities of the situation in which we find ourselves.

We have Tory MPs piling in to demand an in-out referendum before 2015, which they are not going to get. We have former political heavyweights such as Lord Lawson, Denis Healey and Norman Lamont queuing up to say that if there were such a referendum they would vote to leave. We’ve even got Nick Clegg and those poor little BBC presenters locked in a 13-year-old time warp, trying to tell us that, if we did leave, 3.5 million British jobs would vanish because our trade with our European neighbours would somehow dry up overnight.

None of this bears any more relation to where we actually are, as one of the 27 fully signed-up members of the EU, than David Cameron’s threefold dollop of wishful thinking that, if only we re-elect him in 2015, and if only he can somehow persuade his EU colleagues to hand back a few unspecified powers of government –– in breach of the most basic principle on which the EU was founded – he can somehow lead the “Yes” campaign in 2017 to a referendum vote for Britain to stay in.

It is true we may one day by law have to have a referendum, whichever party is in power, because sooner or later the drive to give Brussels even more powers in its efforts to save the doomed euro will require a new treaty. But in the meantime Mr Cameron is terrified that, unless we stay in the EU, we will lose the right to trade freely with its single market. Lord Lawson, in his own muddled way, seems equally to think that, by leaving, we would indeed be excluded from the single market, but that this would be OK because it would somehow bring us “a positive economic advantage”.

The truth is that there is only one way we can get what they, and most people, seem to want, but none of them, except occasionally Nigel Farage, ever mentions it. The only way we can compel our EU partners to negotiate a new relationship which would still give us access to the single market is by invoking Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty. Only thus can we negotiate precisely the kind of relationship already enjoyed, in their different ways, by the two most prosperous countries in Europe, Norway and Switzerland, which trade as freely with the EU as we do, but without the rest of that political baggage that inspires such growing resentment not just in Britain, but in many other EU member states.

This, of course, catches out Mr Cameron, because Article 50 can only be invoked by a country announcing its wish to leave the EU. He flatly refuses to recognise that it is perfectly possible to continue trading freely with the EU without belonging to it.
Lord Lawson falls into the opposite trap by also imagining that leaving the EU means being excluded from the single market, although he seems to think this could be an advantage because we could somehow make up for it by increasing our trade with the rest of the world. But both these men, like countless others, are living in cloud-cuckoo land. They will not bring their thinking back to earth by looking hard-headedly at the rules of the game.
The only way we can now face up to the reality of the plight we are in is by putting Article 50 at the very centre of the national debate. It is the only way we can get the best of both worlds that so many people say they want.
Unless we do so, we are doomed to wander on in a fog of wishful thinking that can only continue to leave us with the worst of all worlds – ruled by a dysfunctional system of government that we increasingly resent, but refuse to understand. In the words of Lady Thatcher I have quoted before, from her book Statecraft, that we should ever have become absorbed into this “European superstate” will one day be seen as “a political error of the first magnitude”.
If we really wish to remedy that error, the only practical way that can be brought about is by invoking Article 50.
Strange weather is normal
When Boris Johnson entertained his readers last week with his account of a bike ride to the Chilterns, he described how he was greeted by the sight of “hawthorn blossom like gun smoke” exploding across the hill-sides. What I suspect he saw was not an early sight of the frozen firework displays of hawthorn blossom, but this year’s late flowering of blackthorn, as I confirmed when travelling through the Chilterns last week, and seeing it still shining white in the hedgerows.
It is true that for some years the hawthorn did flower very much earlier than normal (in 2010 I saw it in Somerset on April 25). This prompted environmental journalists who know little about nature to hail it as one of the proofs, along with primroses in December, that the world was in the grip of runaway warming. But since nature has since returned to its former patterns (last year’s hawthorn didn’t come into flower until May 22), they have gone strangely quiet about such things.
The new party line, as we know, is to promote their cult by going on about anything that can be called an “extreme weather event”, as if such things never happened before, so that any unusual flood, drought or snowfall can be seen as further proof of warming that otherwise remains largely invisible.
I was lately reading the diary entries by Pepys and Evelyn, noting the plethora of “extreme weather events” in the 17th century, when scarcely a year went by when they could not describe some flood, drought, storm or blizzard as being “unknown in the memory of man”. But the 17th century, of course, was the height of the Little Ice Age, when the world was colder than it had been in 13,000 years. Those environmental zealots so eager to blame any aberration in our weather on man-made warming seem to know as little of history as they do of nature.
Arctic heroes honoured at last
The sight of 39 aged veterans lined up on the shores of Loch Ewe, Scotland, to be given Arctic Star medals, and to stand in silent memory of their 3,000 comrades who died on those 78 convoys that battled against all odds to bring military supplies to northern Russia between 1941 and 1945, marked the end of one of the more curious political blunders of our post-war history.
For 68 years successive governments refused to recognise the heroism of those who survived what Churchill called “the worst journey in the world” by giving them medals.
When in 2011 the Russian government struck a medal for the veterans, our Foreign Office forbade them to wear it. Worse still, in Parliament, a junior Tory defence minister, Andrew Robathan, contemptuously refused yet another call for a British campaign medal, saying that Britain does not “throw around medals” like Colonel Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein. We award them, he said, only for “risk and rigour”.
My family took a personal interest in all this because my uncle, Lieutenant-Commander Neil Boyd, was captain of the corvette HMS Poppy, which escorted several convoys, including PQ 17, the deadliest of all. Of 35 merchant ships that left Iceland, only 10 reached Murmansk.
My uncle twice won the Distinguished Service Cross for his service in the Atlantic and North Africa, but was among the thousands of survivors of the Arctic convoys who died before
the Government finally agreed to honour their heroism in a campaign as cruelly packed with horrors as any in the war.
We should be grateful to all those who fought for so long to redress this wrong, including the Tory MP Catherine Dinenage who, in 2011, told Mr Robathan that the “disgusting” policy he supported had “brought shame on our country”.
For some, the memory of that shame is still not wholly erased.

I am become death, destroyer of worlds

I've been accused by some of irresponsibility for highlighting IMF forecasts which, if right, plainly indicate that Spain is insolvent, and will need a big sovereign/banking debt restructuring at some stage.
This leads to the obvious conclusion, spelt out in the headline to my blog, that you should get your money out while you still can. Not a good idea to be encouraging bank runs, says the irrepressible Danny Blanchflower – with whom it is never possible to have a conversation on Twitter without him having the last word – among others.
This is a nonsense argument, not unlike the sort of tut tutting there was when the BBC's Robert Peston revealed that Northern Rock had requested lender of last resort support from the Bank of England. By revealing this story, he helped spark the retail bank run that led eventually to nationalisation of Northern Rock. So should he just have sat on the story, as part of some kind of greater good, public not to know, exercise? Of course not.
As it happened, Mr Peston bent over backwards in his report to assure depositors that their money was safe, which it plainly wasn't without Government intervention. He tried to be as responsible as he could, but he was rightly not going to be party to some kind of cover up.
In Mr Peston's case, the criticism he received was wholly unjustified, since this was a real story, and in any case, wholesale investors were by then already running for the hills. The die had been cast by the time he published. He was only letting the world at large know what the professionals already suspected.
I wouldn't claim anything like the same level of intelligence for my blog. Mine is not a story as such – it is what used to be called a "scoop of interpretation". I've merely taken some quite alarming IMF forecasts and drawn some obvious conclusions from them. Perhaps I'm wrong – that there is no solvency problem in Spain. If so, my words will carry no weight. That's the thing about bank runs. They tend not to happen unless there is genuine reason for concern. So let's get the information out there and let people make up their own minds.

Obamacare Broke: Sebelius Begs for Donations

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has gone, hat in hand, to health industry officials, asking them to make large financial donations to help with the effort to implement President Obama’s landmark health-care law, two people familiar with the outreach said.
Her unusual fundraising push comes after Congress repeatedly rejected the Obama administration’s requests for additional funds to set up the Affordable Care Act, leaving HHS to implement the president’s signature legislative accomplishment on what officials have described as a shoestring budget.
 
Over the past three months, Sebelius has made multiple phone calls to health industry executives, community organizations and church groups and asked that they contribute whatever they can to nonprofit groups that are working to enroll uninsured Americans and increase awareness of the law, according to an HHS official and an industry person familiar with the secretary’s activities. Both spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk openly about private discussions.
An HHS spokesperson said Sebelius was within the bounds of her authority in asking for help.
But Republicans charged that Sebelius’s outreach was improper because it pressured private companies and other groups to support the Affordable Care Act. The latest controversy has emerged as the law faces a string of challenges from GOP lawmakers in Washington and skepticism from many state officials across the country.
Read more from this story HERE.

CO State Senator wants $1BILLION legislation passed with a COIN TOSS!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wz-PtEJEaqY&feature=player_embedded#action=share
On Wednesday Colorado Senator Evie Hudak (D-Westminster) told Senator Owen Hill (R-Colorado Springs) that he could “flip a coin” on a major amendment to a $1 billion bill.