BFF
“Despite expressing serious reservations, the Obama administration has paved the way for legislation that will authorize indefinite detention. The bill places enormous power in the hands of future Presidents, and the only answer the President has is to say “trust me.” “Once any government has the authority to hold people indefinitely, the risk is that it can be almost impossible to rein such power in. President Obama has failed to take the one action – a veto – that would have blocked the dangerous provisions in the NDAA. In so doing, he has allowed human rights to be further undermined and given Al Qaeda a propaganda victory.”………Amnesty International He said, “Trust me”: famous last words? . Yet will he be in power a year and two weeks from now? Or will it be the Likudniks and Salafis of the Republican Party? Mr. Obama is increasingly offering the people who supported him a ‘sort of’ Hobson’s Choice: accept this thing as it is or just live with it as it is. The Obama administrations is more like the Kadima of Ariel Sharon and Tzipi Livni as compared to the Likud of Netanyahu and Yisrael Beitenu of Lieberman (Avigdor not Joe). It has to show that it is as “tough” as the hardliners by bowing and buckling to the hardliners, which makes it seem not so tough after all. For the Middle East it is like the difference between the frying pan and the fire since both American parties have contracted out (the term du jour is outsourced) their Middle East foreign policy to Netanyahu, Lieberman, and the Israeli Likud coalition.The next U.S. president may be the first ever to nominate a political lobbying organization for secretary of state: AIPAC. Cheers
mhg
“Fargo treasures its placid lifestyle, seldom pierced by the mayhem and violence common in other urban communities. North Dakota’s largest city has averaged fewer than two homicides a year since 2005, and there’s not been a single international terrorism prosecution in the last decade. But that hasn’t stopped authorities in Fargo and its surrounding county from going on an $8 million buying spree to arm police officers with the sort of gear once reserved only for soldiers fighting foreign wars. Every city squad car is equipped today with a military-style assault rifle, and officers can don Kevlar helmets able to withstand incoming fire from battlefield-grade ammunition. And for that epic confrontation—if it ever occurs—officers can now summon a new $256,643 armored truck, complete with a rotating turret. For now, though, the menacing truck is used mostly for training and appearances at the annual city picnic, where it’s been parked near the children’s bounce house. “Most people are so fascinated by it, because nothing happens here,” says Carol Archbold, a Fargo resident and criminal justice professor at North Dakota State University. “There’s no terrorism here.”………………”
I don’t think they are all worried about some Texan used car dealer of Iranian origin coming to town with the mexican drug cartel in tow, hellbent on blowing up a Saudi minion in Fargo, ND (I loved that film). Do you?
It is all about the money, honey. A lot of money is being spent on expensive weapons that are not, will not, be needed in most townships. Weapons manufacturers, and their lobbyists, and some lawmakers, are doing quite well, thank you very much. Meanwhile American police forces are going around playing the Waffen-SS, practically raiding the equivalent of shoplifters with assault weapons.
National security my eyes. Cheers
mhg
“During the Sunday show, Romney criticized Gingrich, the former House Speaker, for making a statement in May that “cut the legs out” from under the plan, part of a 2012 budget Ryan proposed back in April. “Are we going to deal with entitlement reform or not?” Romney asked. “Republicans came together, Paul Ryan was the author of the plan. But almost every single Republican voted for it, and the Speaker said this is ‘right-wing social engineering.'” Romney’s actual Medicare plan is not as extreme as Ryan’s, however. Instead, it preserves the existing Medicare program, allowing seniors to choose to receive vouchers for private insurance instead of the government plan, while Ryan would end Medicare in favor of a voucher system. Fox host Chris Wallace pressed Romney on his support for the Ryan budget, suggesting that Ryan’s plans to eliminate $700 billion in aid to states, including $127 billion in food stamps, would make Romney vulnerable to Democratic attacks in the general election. Romney said that he would help the poor by growing the economy, and suggested that cutting government benefits for the poor wouldn’t cause problems. “Cutting welfare spending dramatically, I don’t thinkwill hurt the poor,” Romney said………”
I wonder if taking away Mitt Romney’s trust fund, maybe cutting it dramatically, would not hurt him? I mean taking it away retroactively, since he is now “self-made”. Right wing radio gasbags are right: Obama can blow this guy away in 2012. Even the beleaguered Humphrey, with Chicago ’68 around his neck, almost beat Nixon. And Nixon was smarter. Cheers
mhg
“After 10 months of secret dialogue with Afghanistan’s Taliban insurgents, senior U.S. officials say the talks have reached a critical juncture and they will soon know whether a breakthrough is possible, leading to peace talks whose ultimate goal is to end the Afghan war. As part of the accelerating, high-stakes diplomacy, Reuters has learned, the United States is considering the transfer of an unspecified number of Taliban prisoners from the Guantanamo Bay military prison into Afghan government custody. It has asked representatives of the Taliban to match that confidence-building measure with some of their own. Those could include a denunciation of international terrorism and a public willingness to enter formal political talks with the government headed by the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai. The officials acknowledged that the Afghanistan diplomacy, which has reached a delicate stage in recent weeks, remains a long shot. Among the complications: U.S. troops are drawing down and will be mostly gone by the end of 2014, potentially reducing the incentive for the Taliban to negotiate. ………”
Interesting: the Taliban hosted al-Qaeda and were part of the September 11 attacks that killed thousands of Americans and disrupted the economy and politics of the country. They have been at war with the United States for years and they support terrorism in both Afghanistan and Pakistan and in other places. They have been responsible for many more American dearth. Hezbollah and Hamas have never tried any terror attacks inside the United States. Their attacks were almost always confined to the Lebanese Israeli Palestinian theater, with possibly one or two reported minor exceptions that were not against the United States. They both represent either a majority or a plurality of the people in their respective countries. Hamas won a clear majority of Palestinian votes the last time they had elections, despite the nonsense Secretary Clinton talks about the PLO being a “legitimate government”. Yet the United States is ‘negotiating’ with the even more fundamentalist Salafi Taliban, the partner in September 11 attacks. Not a single Republican or Democrat politician objects to that. Not even the right-wing. Yet any hint of an approach to Hezbollah or Hamas would cause a twin earthquake and volcano in the country. You wanna know why? It is one word, a six-letter word “Israel”. Or maybe it is a four-letter word: “Iran”. Cheers
mhg
““I have two grandchildren: Maggie is 11; Robert is 9,” Gingrich said at Cornerstone Church here. “I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they’re my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American………..”
Newt Gingrich probably meant “what it once meant to be a white American”. So the “brain” of the GOP worries that the USA will turn into an atheist society that will be controlled by radical Muslims. Some people claim that he is, essentially, the “brain” of the new regional Republican Party. If that is the logic used by the “brain” of the GOP, I shudder to think what utterances its “ass” can makes. I am not talking about Beck and Limbaugh and the usual right-wing media gasbags. I mean mostly the others in the Republican race. Cheers
mhg
“Oil policy was often divorced from the wider politics of the region, analysts said, with one observing that “the Iranians have been trying very hard to please the Saudis right now”. Iran appears eager not to further antagonise Saudi Arabia at a time when Tehran is coming under increasing international pressure over its nuclear programme. Tehran’s main concern appears to be to discourage Riyadh from facilitating an expected European oil embargo by promising to make up for lost production. The Islamic republic’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, earlier this week sent Heydar Moslehi, the intelligence chief, to Saudi Arabia for a rare meeting with its interior minister, Prince Nayef……..”
They can kiss all they want, the Iranians and the Saudis, but it will never develop into a deep tongue-twisting body-tingling French kiss. Not of the kind they have with their respective allies.Not of the kind George W. Bush used to have with King Abdullah. Cheers
mhg
“The court action, filed in Manhattan federal court, seeks nearly half a billion dollars in penalties from three Lebanese financial organizations — the now-defunct Lebanese Canadian Bank and two Beirut-based money exchange houses — and 30 auto dealers in the United States. The $480 million in penalties is the sum of the drug proceeds that are alleged to have been laundered; the government is also seeking to freeze and seize assets traceable to those companies………… Thursday’s complaint offers fresh details about the workings of what it says was a scheme to launder South American cocaine cash and Hezbollah’s own money, naming the American-based auto dealers and people it says were Hezbollah operatives. For example, the action charges that Oussama Salhab was a Hezbollah operative in Togo who ran a network that transported cash from cars sold in Benin on flights to Beirut. Prosecutors say he worked with Maroun Saade — suspected of being a member of the Free Patriotic Movement, a Lebanese Christian political party allied with Hezbollah — who has been charged in a separate case with aiding the Taliban………”
I wonder what Mel Brooks is up to these days? Is he teaming up with Oliver Stone? Could those two be working on something like this, this topic of my piece here?
Is it just the holiday season or is the world going crazy around me? At least from my current perspective in the Pacific Northwest it seems like many heretofore otherwise sensible people are going mad. Look at all this:
Hezbollah alliance with the Taliban (across fourteen centuries of separation, across five nations of separation)?
Iranian alliance with al-Qaeda which is the mortal Wahhabi enemy of the Shi’as (including Iranians and Iraqis and Lebanese and Bahrainis and Pakistanis and all others)?
Iranian and al-Qaeda alliance allegedly but ridiculously improbably going way back to the 1990s, mostly via the good offices and miraculous guesswork of Judge John D. Bates of the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia?
Iranian-Mexican Drug Cartel-Texan Nutcase alliance to blow up a restaurant in Georgetown and its famous clients just because it serves mediocre food to smug bureaucrats and charges too much? This last one allegedly courtesy of the DEA and the U.S. Department of Justice, and possibly Mujahideen-e-Khalq, among others.
Iraqi-Iranian-Syrian (wtf?)-Lebanese alliance to conquer Bahrain as a prelude to conquering the rest of the world and forcing Rick Santorum and Rick Perry to become Muslims and make the Hajj to Mecca?
Lebanese-Columbian-Taliban-Hezbollah-Maronite Christian plot to make money from a new triangular trade but without the rum and the African slaves.
WTF is going on here? Is everyone going paranoid or are all of these plots real? Should we start looking under our beds each night for Iranian mullahs and Lebanese Shi’as? Are the Wahhabi princes now financing the hated Shi’a militants as well? Or is it just that the ‘plots’ are thickening? Cheers
mhg
“Former House speaker and Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has picked a foreign policy expert at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh to be his national security adviser. Kiron Skinner directs CMU’s International Relations and Politics department and also services on the Chief of Naval Operations Executive Panel and service on the Council of Foreign Relations. Skinner has previously served as an adviser on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as a member of the Defense Policy Board of the U.S. Department of Defense from 2001 to 2007. Skinner will continue to teach full-time on social and decision sciences at CMU, but will be on call to advise Gingrich………” Clearly Newt Gingrich doesn’t like to stray far from the ‘reservation, at least in matters of picking policy advisers, if not in ‘other’ matters. Hischoice is somewhat better than Romney, who picked a veteran of the right-wing and genocidal Lebanese Forces militia (apparently Romney feels that he needs to shore up his right-wing credentials). But, hey, the day is young, and I have not looked in Mr. Skinner’s closet yet. This almost certainly means that he, Newt, will decline my advise to take a hike on the Iraq-Iran border, preferably making a two-feet sortie across the border. Dommage. Gingrich is also eschewing the Bush-Obama-Clinton trend of seeking high profile female foreign policy advisers (Albright, Rice &Rice). Maybe ‘somebody’ has learned something after all. Cheers
mhg
“The debt crisis sweeping southern Europe and lapping France is cause for alarm in Washington and Beijing, but not it seems for the rank and file of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party. On the contrary, at a meeting of Merkel’s Christian Democrats the mood among delegates ranged from triumphalism over Germany’s economic strength to complacency about the crisis and blind faith in Berlin’s ability to shield Germany from it. Merkel warned on the first day of the congress Monday that Europe faced what could be its “toughest hour since World War Two.” But her message didn’t register with many of those in the hall or with the German media. Much press coverage focused on domestic issues – the minimum wage, childcare and education………… Unemployment has fallen to its lowest levels since German reunification in 1990 and the smaller “Mittelstand” firms that form the backbone of Europe’s largest economy have strong order backlogs.…….”
That “alles” also includes the United States, speaking of economics. While U.S. corporations have rushed during the past two decades to export more jobs than products, German firms have focused on keeping jobs inside Germany. German government policies have helped. The American corporatist right-wing has been making a lot of noise about patriotism, while facilitating the opposite: the weakening of the Middle Class in favor of corporations. Even Dick Cheney’s beloved Halliburton, beneficial of so many American government contracts moved its headquarters to the Persian-American Gulf, to be near the potentates so beloved by the Cheneys, and for patriotic tax purposes. Remember all the swooning over the “Japanese model”? I was in graduate school in those days and I remember that it immediately preceded the long stagnation of the Japanese economy. Forget the Japanese model, forget the crazy Tea Party model. Go the German model, but that may require some sort of mass lobotomy for the corporate and political leaders. And who is going to perform that? Will Obamacare cover that (Germany, like all other industrial countries except the United States, has a robust public health system)? Cheers
mhg
“Insanity combined with intelligence can be
defined as “genius” in some cases. Insanity combined with stupidity can
be defined as “Republican candidate” these days.“Me
“Saturday’s Republican debate, sponsored by CBS and the National Journal, revealed a Republican field that is promising war on Iran and a revival of the use of torture, as well as horrible relations with the new governments in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya (according to Herman Cain, they have gotten “out of hand,” and he and Gingrich want to deal with them by supporting a muscular Christianity)………. The only adults in the room were John Huntsman and Ron Paul, who have no realistic chance of being the standard-bearer. They denounced water-boarding as torture and generally punctured the warmongering of the others. But it is shameful that potential US presidents are even talking about torturing people and launching wars of aggression………..These people just like the idea of war. War is good for munitions firms and security firms, who give a lot of money to Republican candidates. They’re actively looking for a war. It is good for business, for them……….” Juan Cole
These people must be a mix of insane and/or stupid, most likely a combination of both. Insanity combined with intelligence can be defined as “genius” in some cases. Insanity combined with stupidity can be defined as “Republican candidate” these days. (One exception is John Huntsman and maybe Ron Paul to some extent). It is like watching an old film reel of the rise of fascism and Nazism in Europe. Minus the beer halls and minus the brownshirts and blackshirts. Is Iran the new Czechoslovakia? Or is it the new Poland? How about Danzig and the Persian Gulf Corridor? Or will it be a Pearl Harbor in reverse? After all, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor for ‘nearly’ the same reasons these candidates want to attack Iran. Cole is also right: maybe these people are smart after all. There is a lot of money to be made by corporations in a war. On the backs of the American people, who will see their services deteriorate as the deficit grows to a few trillion more from a possible “Mother of all Middle East Wars”. Cheers
mhg
Rattlesnake Ridge 
BFF 
