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Oh sure, now that they are under attack, they want the US back in. But no, while we were there, they did nothing to let us know who was friend or foe… The US can’t help everyone. We should help those who help us; and draw the line against those who cheered when we lost men.
We did our best. We tried to fix your nation. But you, created havoc. You knowingly hid insurgents after they attacked us. You sheltered and condoned their actions.
So suffer bitches…
Oh, we know they are bad guys. That is why we tried to bolster your army and it was, it was trained by the best military in the world.. And what did you do? You sneaked terrorists in in uniform, to blow us up. You knew who they were… You aided and abetted them.
Wars cost money, and in case you haven’t been reading the papers, money is something we don’t have. If we spend it, it needs to be on those who by their actions are worth it…
You made your bed. Now lie in it.. You don’t need or deserve help from us.. Maybe after you see what it is like to have your sons and daughters killed, for nothing, you will have a better understanding of what we and one trillion dollars tried to do…
You could have been so great. But you wouldn’t tell us who was friend and who was foe…
Enjoy your fate. Enjoy your slogans. A lot of good they will do you when you’re dead.
The plural of Vanilla Ice would be pronounced ….. Vanilla Ice’s (or ISIS)…
They ran out of Vanilla in the Syrian desert….
Tough group, aren’t they? If they walked down my street like this, I too would hide….
Throw this in Cheney’s face next time he or anyone associated with the word neocons opens their mouth….
Beside Biden’s this is one of the best predictions ever made of the Mid East……
I’m a little late, but I wanted to mark down mostly for myself but sharing it as well, the accomplishments being made as a direct result of last year’s elections…. Some of the conclusions are superfluous, but are perceived to be a result of the election’s consequences, and since perception is nine tenths of reality, they too are a force with which to be reckoned..
Remember this is general and is being painted with a broad brush….
The economy is number one. Some taxes were raised which boosted the economy almost immediately. This has been the most consistent trend over the past year. The economy has benefited the same people it benefited before. It has not seemed to help those who were not helped before. If you are an investor, this has been a great year. Stock Market has never been higher.
The number of private sector jobs has consistently grown across 2013…..
One of the marvelous trends is the fact that once the solid line is crossed in the year 2010, it never drops below… That means we have consistently been growing private sector jobs… Since 2010 we have never had a negative month… one where we actually lost jobs. However Unemployment has not fared so well. Even though we are growing jobs, we still have a ways to go. In one of the most amazing graphs… so amazing I’m rather surprise it has not been featured until now, one sees all employment across this century….
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What is fascinating is first, the constant rate of growth. the pitch of the line never changes. But what is freaky, is exactly how that pitch mirrors the employment growth of the Bush years… Not even Republicans can fault George W. Bush’s employment growth up until 2007. Obama’s rate mirrors his rate exactly.
It needs more quantified research, but initial speculation would be that since the tax rates were similar (The Bush Cuts were carried over) that factor pretty well determines the maximum rate at which our nation’s economy is able to grow. Furthermore it shows us that if consistency prevails, and since it has for the past 10 years there is little likelihood it wouldn’t, then we will have grown into employment levels which we had just before the crash in fall of 2014……
So investors have done well; the middle class hasn’t.
Consumer spending is exactly the same level as of the first of the year. It’s low was reached during the sequester fight (Jan 28) and its high, was on August 18th. As for now, we are were we were Christmas Day 2012.
Consumer Confidence is right where it was in January. We had some peaks over summer, but he shutdown lowered us back to where the threat of a shutdown held us hostage as the year began…..
Only since 2013 have we made progress on hammering down the deficit. The national debt is still huge. it will take multiple budget surpluses to whittle it down, and to achieve that, we need to again tax more than we spend. But we are not spending a trillion dollars in deficits anymore. we are only over spending by 600 billion which may become less by years end than 2003’s deficit….
Enough economics.
On the world front:
- We have a possible solution to Iran’s giving up on being a nuclear power.
- We have Syria dismantling their chemical weapons.
- We are on course to leave Afghanistan.
- We have Iraq begging us to please, please come back.
All of these would have gone completely the opposite way if you remember what Romney was promising during the debates.
- Attack Iran with shock and awe.
- Attack Syria with shock and awe,
- Attack Iraq with shock and awe… oh wait, that was Rumsfeld. Instead, Iraq was that we should never leave, and we should also stay in Afghanistan indefinitely. But we should have never gone into Libya. My goodness, can you image the shambles the world would be in if he had ever been elected?
Not to mention, his pushing of tightening up the money supply. Just the anticipation of such, sends our stock market into a panic.
Domestically we have weathered Benghazi, more a Republican talking point than anything important. We worked through the IRS scandal which it was revealed to be a forward thinking sound policy and not a scandal after all.. Political groups friendly to the president were swept up in the nets as well.
The Common Core package fortunately seems to have stalled. It was always a low priority, and with the drying up of TARP and Stimulus funding, it seems like most state’s enthusiasm is drying up as well. The program does not seem to be able to get past the roadblock that the tests themselves create. There is enough opposition by enough parents so that this program maybe salvageable in part, but dead in the water as a whole.
It would be nice to have a viable program in its place. One that aims to put an 11:1 student/teacher ratio in troubled public schools.
But, the most notable event and the one with the biggest blowout, was the revelations by one Edward Snowden which were made last July. America is collecting huge amounts of data. Since then the leaks have only become worse. Americans have compromised the entire Internet. They have broken into banks, they have spied on foreign competitors, they have become a service offering “information for hire…. ” And although too early to tell, implications are that is may have been done secretly even keeping the president and his officers completely in the dark….
Which is really scary. Cheney’s shadow government is alive and well……
If true, this is our greatest threat. Simply because unlike the economy, unlike unemployment, unlike Syria, Iran, or Israel, unlike the Republican yellow journalistic scandals…. this one is against us. It violates our Constitution. It is against all we purport to be…..
One interesting parallel…. Long, long, long ago, the city state of Rome was also a viable democracy, and like us, it too expanded its empire across the known world… Until Julius Caesar marched his armies into Rome, took over the reins as dictator, done in order to bypass the quagmire in which it’s Congress had become bogged down… It was originally supposed to be a temporary solution…. For the next 400 odd years, Rome never went back… Instead one bad Caesar followed another, often at the point of a sword (there was no NRA back then)…
Looking the other way at a scandal of this proportion, especially if it was done as a rogue element of which the White House now even barely has a clue as to how deep it goes… and what is has been doing, then we already have a Caesar, and whoever it is, they are not elected by us, We, The People….
This can be fixed quietly, internally, and we may never hear of its resolution. Or it could get worse. Much worse…
The final solution is to cut off the NSA from its unlimited sources of money…. Even shut it down, or better, let a more porous government agency, even that of the CIA take it over….
Spying on American citizens is simply put…. un American. It has never been who we are. We’ve always chose the other way. It does not represent what we want ourselves to be…. Any person could spy on their neighbor if they wished. Any person could hide in his neighbor’s bushes and watch them get undressed… Most of us would be so creeped out at just the idea, we would never, ever consider doing such a thing.
The fact that most of us would never consider something that creepy, has always been what has made Americans so special, so likable, and so loved the world around…. We were different from those Communists…. Well, not any more.
As each new NSA revelation comes out, one just can’t shake the creepy feeling that somewhere Voldermort, somehow is pulling all the strings……
We are a tired generation… We grew up with ‘Nam. Which ever side we were on during the battle here in America over that police action, or war, looking back after it was done, …. we all knew it was wrong….
After that we thought all war was wrong, and unfortunately took some of that angst out on those who least deserved it: those coming back from the steamy jungles of hell…..
Against our will a certain president soon sent Marines into Beirut; what happened then reinforced our belief that an American war was unjustifiable and that all other means must be utilized to prevent American war from ever happening again…. Against our will, we propped up a Nicaragua dictator against some rebels. Against our will, we sold arms to Iran to use for paying for our support for that Nicaragua dictator, since a Congress elected by the American people, flatly said no to supporting him in Nicaragua… We found a way to do it anyway….
I remember Senator Rudman, (R-NH) saying at the hearing while addressing Oliver North,… “The American people have the RIGHT to be wrong.”
Oliver North had been insisting that even when Americans flatly say NO, one still must do what one deems is necessary, that whatever one deems necessary, is the highest moral truth. “Sometimes one has to go above the law!” was actually said by the defense at this hearing. Only one good thing came out of those hearings: we all were introduced to Fawn Hall.
But then… The Brits quickly regained the Faulklands. Then came Grenada, which went off without a hitch. Then Panama, which was successful and almost painless. Then came General Schwartzkopf. The 4th largest army in the world, was routed in hours, and in days, had been completely mopped up. Then came the Balkans. We were on a roll. We’d finally nailed down the successful formula of how to win in battle.
Today we say Iraq is a failure. But that was so not so just after the invasion. Inside Baghdad, the pulling down of Saddam’s statue, the victory of capturing Saddam, the ability of us to hand out billions of American dollars, initially gave this campaign the luster of looking like another success story…
Until we tried to steal their oil. The standard global rate of dividing oil revenues is that the US gets a 20% cut for the development, and Iraq would get to keep 80% because it is after all, their resource. That is how we deal with Nigeria.
But Brenner announced that we’d flip that to pay for the war, and that Iraq would be allowed to keep 20% because we liked them so much, and we’d only, by our good graces, take 80% of the revenues. 24 hours after letting that cat out of the bag, the first IED went off under a US military vehicle… Before week was out, the total was in the hundreds.
The luster was gone. We were an invading army, something we have not called ourselves since WWII. We always saw ourselves as the policeman who leaves as soon as order is restored…
Afghanistan likewise, got worse. Then Pakistan. Then Yemen. On the diplomatic front instead of doing no harm, .. we could do no good. Then Libya costs us an ambassador who was running guns through Turkey. He shouldn’t have been there; it should have been a low level staffer with security clearance.
This baby boomer generation knows that war is wrong. We know from experience. The only time it can be employed successfully, is a) when the whole world is united behind you, b) you go in and get out, and c) you have a structure that stays in place long after you are gone.
The only time it goes badly… is every other scenario.
Which brings us to Syria. Syria has no importance to anyone. (They couldn’t even defend the militarily advantageous Golan Heights in ’67!) Which is why we let the Russians have them.
People are going to die in Syria if a): Assad wins, b): the rebels win, or c): no one wins. The only thing changing upon this wars outcome, is which side will be massacred at war’s end. Hence the battle for survival over there now.
So by having the US intervene or not, we are choosing which side gets to kill the other after the hostilities die down.
The weakest argument for going in still left with standing, is that they used chemical weapons. In WWI, the British, French, and Germans all used chemical weapons. Are chemical weapons really worse than being burned alive? Or asphyxiated as a bomb blast sucks all the oxygen out of your lungs and the room? Or a milk jug sized piece of jagged metal shrapnel ripping and leaving a hole through your body? Or a mine being stepped on? I’m trying to think why chemical weapons are so much worse, except for the fact that we’ve been told” they are so much worse”?
A causality is a causality.
We understand “why” some say we should go into Syria. Because if we do not respond to chemical weapons in a big way, someone else will become confident and use theirs. There is only one way to keep the genie inside the bottle, and that is to never leave a opening for it to escape….
We also understand “why” one of our beloved School districts had a policy that suspended, and expelled those who brought weapons to school! Not just guns, but knives too. After all, the argument for punishing Syria, applies to soon-to-become high school felons too.
But, there came a time when the response generated by a policy, actually became the crime, You remember the little boy expelled who brought a cake to school, and his grandmother thoughtfully sent a knife knowing teachers usually don’t have utensils in their classrooms. The teacher actually cut the cake, served it, thinking nothing of it.. it was someone higher up, reviewing the situation, who said, “wait, that can be interpreted as a breach of regulations. Let’s make an example out of this little boy”. He was suspended and could have been expelled, except it eventually became news and public outcry was solidly on his side. The policy makers were laughed out of town.
Which is why, if you are making this decision, you need to stall. Acting quickly and decisively is equivalent to acting on rumor and innuendo. So what if Syria lied and shot the gas cannisters off?
Does a military strike create enough excellent good will to neutralize this bad act?
Ironically what is best for the US in this situation, is for Assad to stay in power, to have a zealous change in heart, to work closely with the USA to get his economy working, to becoming a partner in that region with the US, and to signing a treaty with Israel, as did the Egyptians many, many years ago…
What is worse for us, is if the jihadists win, push out the moderates and take over the reform movement (they always do), then go to war with Israel, Jordan and Turkey. Making ourselves into the evil empire will only create more explosions everywhere, flare-ups which would not have occurred had we taken the Jedi way, and used the “Force” in our possession, to make events on the ground turn our way and happen in our favor….
Realistically such a rosy scenario probably can’t happen; but if it did, were this to come about, there would be no doubt: Obama would be lauded as the best president we’d ever see in our lifetimes. The cost of failure is so low that it just might be worth the try.
The second point… which all us Viet-namers will well remember, is that you may win every engagement you participate in Syria, but you won’t win the war at home, and that… will suck all your energy away from all the good you plan to do before 2016.
It broke LBJ. It broke Bush II. Don’t let it break you….
it is always nice to say “I told you so” even when it irritates those listening to have to hear it. I apologize in advance for this is one of these moment. But the first story I saw today, was one that i went on a limb to state and took flack for. It has now come to pass.
in what now seems like a previous lifetime, when there actually were Conservatives on the blog circuit, I stated that teeming up with the Chinese was our solution to stabalizing and getting out of Iraq. I made the point that we’d lost the right to develop all of Iraq’s oil and would never get it being the oppressor; we should use a third party as a front, and partner with them to at least get some access.
The oil barons all cried traitor…
Lol. Well, today Reuters broke the story that Exxon was partnering with PetroChina to develop one of the massive oil fields near Basra. As an aside to that story, it mentions that one of Iraq’s targets is to be outproducing Saudi Arabia by 2020.
it is always nice to always be right. 🙂 But just imagine if we’d done it back in 2007.
An old American was reprocessing his old studies of Brezhnev-Soviet-Military thinking and brought back interesting points of discussion that directly relate to Syria.
The old Soviets had a classification for different types of wars:
“Many of these—such as the categorization of wars in ideological terms (including wars between imperialism and socialism, civil wars between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, wars between bourgeois states, national liberation wars)—now appear quaint and irrelevant for understanding today’s (and perhaps even yesterday’s) world.”
There was one other: wars between the people and a regime of extreme reaction
“What they understood about these conflicts between a dictatorial regime and its opponents was that they were not conflicts between two parties, but among three”
“In wars between the people and a regime of extreme reaction…both communists and non-communists united to fight the dictatorship, with each group hoping later to establish its preferred form of government (dictatorship of the proletariat or republican democracy).
In these conflicts, once the dictator was overthrown, the Soviets knew they eventually had the upper hand because their supported group had outside support, whereas the moderates would be (abandoned by the United States who had been propping up the dictator) forced to fend for themselves. With all factors being equal, the extra force could make a minority within the initial revolt, grab power after all was done.
Back then, it was America supporting the regimes of extreme reaction; the Soviets were seen the revolutionaries. Today it is Russia and Iran, who support these dictatorial regimes, and moderates and a few islamists who are those engaged in making change.
The lesson taught was that once Assad falls, without America’s strong continued support of the moderates, the otherwise strong support of Saudi’s Sunnis behind the Islamists will tip the balance to their favor. For as in the past, when moderates took on an American supported regime of extreme reaction, and the communists joined in the fight, it became viewed as part of the bipolar tug of war between the Communists and Capitalistic USA. Therefore even though the moderates usually far outnumbered the splinter cells of Communists, because the ending conflict was deemed a Soviet victory over the US, the communists had tremendous clout and enough support to take over power.
This certainly makes Syria clear. In their battle against Assad, the Islamists supported by the Radical Sunni movements are few in number compared to the moderates who want a democratic republic after Assad leaves.
If Assad gets pushed out, the Islamists because of their unlimited funding and support can push themselves into power quickly, meanwhile the moderates sit around and try to figure out their next step. In that vacuum the organized faction always wins. The US then as now, could prevent this from happening by throwing its weight behind the moderates after the dictator is removed by being a counterbalancing force.
Our success in Western Europe after the Second World War by doing just that, never translated itself afterwards over to East Asia, Africa, or Central America. Instead of immediately inserting ourselves as a civilian presence when moderates and radicals toppled a regime, we sat on our hands, and only later would then send military hardware in our feeble attempt to contain the outbreak our own inaction created.
The lesson for the US is that we really need to not focus so much first on the war itself and then immediately extricate ourselves after the conflict when we are needed most, but we actually we need to use our debacle in Iraq as a self-taught lesson to create a civilian team we can move in at a moment’s notice with all the backing and assistance exhibited by the Marshall Plan, to quickly mend broken services, return to normalcy, and stifle the unrest that allows civil wars to fester and continue among both factions of winners long after the regime of extreme reaction is overthrown.
We need to focus on reacting immediately with ways to get a nation quickly back on its own feet as soon as the Dictator is disposed.
Our opponents of 40 years ago figured this out. If we can learn this, that may be the most valuable legacy the Brezhnev era can ever pass on to us.
Here is what we know.
Group of people put up money for film. Allegedly $5 million dollars.
Film gets made, and actors are later shocked to find their voices were dubbed over and that they were portrayed completely different from what was actually filmed. Evidence is visible on trailer if you watch.
Film can find no Arabs who will play. They use hillbillies and put on spray on tans ( rushed job; you can see where they missed)
Film gets edited , and debuts in a theater in Hollywood, and all wait… BOOM…. nothing happens….
Film finally debuts on website of that fake charlatan who was in Florida burning Korans a little while ago. That sets off search engine and the trailer hits Google.
That being a known, monitored anti-Muslim site, the film gets picked up in Egypt and goes viral.
Upset people riot.
Riot occurs in Libya, not where ambassador was, but at a consulate. Ambassador goes to consulate and dies.
US announces that those attacking the embassy were not part of the riot, unless they created the riot as a diversion.
Romney criticizes Obama for causing the problem.
Romney defends his remarks despite the death of the ambassador. Meaning did Romney, like John McCain over Georgia, have foreknowledge of the impending attack, and the ambassadors death was a freak accident, he stumbled in and discovered it was not an Islamic but a US operation?
Wishy Washy Romney, is stuck, cannot give more fuel to the claim he doesn’t think before speaking, so he buttons down harder on his original remark….
The director who made the film is a fictitious person. Some reports say he is in hiding, but, a producer, Steve Klein who is now taking full responsibility for the film, has a history.
This Steve Klein is not what reports said. This Steve Klein is the author of a piece called “Eric Holder: The Ugliest of Things” which uses the trial of Gitmo holdees in a civilian court way back when, to call for the impeachment and imprisonment of the US Attorney General for violation of the Constitution. This is a very provocative piece made to defend the insanity of right wing thinkers, and the element of provocation fits very well with this film’s provocative nature… If put on a couch and analyzed Steve Klein would be a person who has to shock and awe others in order to consider himself worthwhile….. like a meth-head.
Steve Klein is connected to the whacky shell group called Courageous Christians United. This strange group or eclectics has a division that sparks hate with Muslims, a division that sparks hate with Jehovah’s Witnesses, and a division that sparks hate with Mormans.
Obviously the anti- Morman connection is perfect, for who would expect Mitt Romney of orchestrating this fiasco, if it got traced back to Steve Klein. The smart money would bet that Klein’s group could be stoked to sponsor an anti Muslim film, and then those with the right connections could create the hassle in Libya that Romney needed to illustrate his lie which portrays that Obama is not truly the best president in foreign affairs we have ever had in our lifetime… Everyone knows: Flat out, he is.
That press statement of Romney was off; it didn’t make sense as pundits were quick to point out. It was like it had been rehearsed way too many times, and was just waiting for the right second, to be spit out… “Ok, Romney, it just went down. Got confirmation; it’s a go.. in 5; four, three, two, one. You’re on!…………………………………..”
The Republican Party is like a WWII bomber, missing its tail section and having both wings shot off.. It is going down……. They desperately needed a diversion to try to get the men out alive before it explodes on the ground. Hey, fighter pilots… look over there.
This is a Swift Boat Attempt upon the current president. But instead of using film, a medium whose threads could be trace, they decided to use Muslims who have no accountability, and basically pull out of the same play-book as 1980, and stage an embassy takeover to bring down Jimmy Carter and put Ronald Reagan (oh my… what a wonderful coincidence that the hostages get released as soon as Reagan ,pronounced as President of the United States of America, gets beamed to Iran…) Oh, yeah that’s right. It was Dick Cheney was authored that. With that much guilt, I’d have heart attacks too…
The link got pulled within the past three hours, but earlier according to Google, one of the backers of this $5 million film was Sheldon Adelson, who once backed Gingrich, and then flipped to Romney. Very soon we will know who the others were.
So the theory stands even though it is still being put together, that this event was caused by the same people supporting Romney, this event was orchestrated in order to make it appear that Israelis made the film and the United States sanctioned it. Truth is, we do have a contingent of America that is very unchristian and actually do believe whatever they are told, (our Tea Party Contingent), just as Muslim leaders have similar headaches within their own borders.
The more one looks into all the pieces that came together and the smooth planning that seamed all the pieces together leaving no loose ends, even though the idea is far fetched, and as yet, still speculative…. it is fun putting the pieces together, even if later they turn out wrong…..
The theory that makes the most sense out of Romney’s ridiculous statement, is that he appears to have had fore knowledge and was uninformed at his speech that something had gone desperately wrong.
When you look at the evidence this is the only way it could be…. Just like our Commander in Chief’s birth certificate is a forgery . It’s the only way it could be… 🙂
“The events in Egypt and Libya show the failure of the Egyptian and Libyan governments to uphold their obligations to keep our diplomatic missions safe and secure and the regard in which the United States is held under President Obama in these two countries,” he told Foreign Policy’s Josh Rogin. “It’s all part of a broader scheme of the president’s failure to be an effective leader for U.S. interests in the Middle East.”
Wrong… Wrong… Wrong
It was because of a movie. A really bad movie… in fact. I was offended by it. Deeply so.
If someone made a similar movie about Jesus, the American Tea Party would have done exactly the same as did those Muslims. They would have attacked a black church, killed the preacher and burned it to the ground.
The problem is the movie., not Obama. A movie that was incidentally funded by groups also providing support to the Romney Campaign, and to the Republican Party. The same benefactors. As soon as the New Century Club’s name come up, it begs for a comparison to using public events to mold and formulate policy. It now appears that the riots were staged as a cover up for the murder.
Delaware Liberal provided a list of those advising Romney on foreign policy. Many of those names give credence to the unthinkable, that this event was staged by supporters of the Romney campaign, to make Obama look bad…….
It is obvious Romney is being advised by nuts. People who are just nuts. They are nuts on foreign policy. They are nuts on economic policy. They are nuts on women. They are nuts on religion. Simply put, they are nuts.
How can anyone who is a real Christian, support these nuts?
Today’s joke: Why did Romney’s staff scatter when the convention was over? They thought they saw a squirrel…..
kavips 