Discussion Topic |
|
This thread has been locked |
shut up and pull
climber
|
|
This is from a speech Obama made in 2006:
The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies.
Over the past 5 years, our federal debt has increased by $3.5 trillion to $8.6 trillion.That is “trillion” with a “T.” That is money that we have borrowed from the Social Security trust fund, borrowed from China and Japan, borrowed from American taxpayers. And over the next 5 years, between now and 2011, the President’s budget will increase the debt by almost another $3.5 trillion.
Numbers that large are sometimes hard to understand. Some people may wonder why they matter. Here is why: This year, the Federal Government will spend $220 billion on interest. That is more money to pay interest on our national debt than we’ll spend on Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. That is more money to pay interest on our debt this year than we will spend on education, homeland security, transportation, and veterans benefits combined. It is more money in one year than we are likely to spend to rebuild the devastated gulf coast in a way that honors the best of America.
And the cost of our debt is one of the fastest growing expenses in the Federal budget. This rising debt is a hidden domestic enemy, robbing our cities and States of critical investments in infrastructure like bridges, ports, and levees; robbing our families and our children of critical investments in education and health care reform; robbing our seniors of the retirement and health security they have counted on.
Every dollar we pay in interest is a dollar that is not going to investment in America’s priorities.
Senator Barack Obama
Senate Floor Speech on Public Debt
March 16, 2006
|
|
shut up and pull
climber
|
|
When you read that speech in 2006, and see how vehement Obama was about how bad our debt situation was THEN -- it must make libs' heads explode to somehow try and defend how Hopey acts now about the debt (it is many times bigger), and the debt limit (i.e., there is no probem, keep spending).
|
|
Crimpergirl
Sport climber
Boulder, Colorado!
|
|
Radical notes: The media has one purpose: deliver viewers to advertisers. Period"
You're saying there is zero journalistic integrity? None, zero, zip?
Are ALL doctors now just in it for the money?
Are all lawyers ambulance chasers?
Is ever single politician a duplicates, selfish man interested in nothing but power?
Is every cop also crooked?
I said nothing about integrity, lawyers, doctors or politicians. I stated what the primary role of the media is and it is to deliver viewers to advertisers. You may feel differently and that's fine. Delivering viewers to advertisers does not necessarily entail lacking integrity or selfishness or power or being crooked. Those are your words.
|
|
shut up and pull
climber
|
|
Fat -- the GOP will cave. Its what they always do. Look at the "35 billion dollar cut" Boehner negotiated a couple weeks ago. When looked at straight on -- it is a mere 14 bil of actual cuts. A massive sham.
This country is being driven right into the toilet, with the Dems holding the wheel, and the GOP pushing from behind.
|
|
shut up and pull
climber
|
|
A LITTLE HISTORY LESSON, FROM ANDREW MCCARTHY, THE FEDERAL PROSECUTOR IN THE 1993 WTC BOMBINGS.
May 2, 2011 12:30 P.M.
A Different Kind of Justice
The policies that enabled yesterday’s success
By Andrew McCarthy
‘Justice has been done.” That was President Obama’s succinct assessment of the killing of Osama bin Laden by U.S. special-ops forces, carried out at his direction on Sunday. “We will be true to the values that make us who we are,” he said. Those values are what led him to pronounce justice done — no trial and no court authorization, and, for once, “habeas corpus” really meant that our government had the body, a corpse to identify, not a defendant to process.
It is worth remembering that bin Laden had been under indictment by the Justice Department for 13 years when he finally met his demise yesterday. A federal grand jury in Manhattan had charged him with terrorism conspiracy in June 1998, after he had, yet again, declared war on the United States. He’d already been doing that for years. It was only a few weeks later, on Aug. 7, 1998, that his al-Qaeda cells in eastern Africa bombed the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam — the first 224 of what became the thousands of innocents the master terrorist would murder in the ensuing decade-plus.
I argued in The Weekly Standard at the time (“The Sudan Connection: The Missing Link in U.S. Terrorism Policy”) that “justice” for bin Laden and the global jihad backed by several rogue nations — Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Sudan, for starters — was to regard them as a national-security challenge crying out for a military response. They were manifestly not a crime problem to be managed by FBI agents and prosecutors like me.
Yet, prosecution of crime rather than war had been the Clinton-administration counterterrorism strategy, beginning with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. It was maintained through a plot to bomb New York City landmarks later that year and a conspiracy to blow U.S. airliners out of the sky over the Pacific thereafter. The law-enforcement approach was even reaffirmed after jihadists killed 19 U.S. airmen in the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia — an attack the Clinton administration soon learned Iran had orchestrated, the mullahs and their forward militia, Hezbollah, having had cooperative relations with al-Qaeda since the early nineties.
Still nothing changed — in fact, President Clinton stood idle as the Saudis obstructed the FBI’s fruitless effort to investigate Khobar Towers. The ’98 embassy bombings did briefly stir Bill Clinton to lob a few cruise missiles bin Laden’s way — including at a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory that Clintonistas to this day maintain was a joint WMD venture involving bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. But that moment of clarity quickly passed — the threat was growing by leaps and bounds as threats are certain to do when met with fecklessness, but the Lewinsky scandal was finally burning out and with it Clinton’s impetus to treat a war like a war.
By the end of 1999, the 9/11 Commission gingerly recounts, Clinton had so befuddled the CIA regarding whether covert agents had authority to kill bin Laden that several golden opportunities were lost. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda continued to plan stunning operations, including the bombing of a naval destroyer, the U.S.S. Cole, in October 2000 — murdering 17 U.S. sailors as Clinton made his exit from the stage.
Prompted by the 9/11 atrocities, a new administration dramatically changed course. At least for a time, the government’s sense of “justice” was brought in line with the public’s: Pres. George W. Bush pledged that we would hunt terror cells down wherever they operated, and we would put the rogue regimes that abetted al-Qaeda to the test of changing their ways or feeling the wrath of the world’s lone superpower.
The Taliban, al-Qaeda’s hosts in Afghanistan, were driven from power, and bin Laden’s sometime-ally, Saddam Hussein, soon followed. Yet, bin Laden himself eluded our armed forces and intelligence services. Simultaneously, Iraq devolved from a spectacularly swift vindication of the Bush doctrine to a bloody, years-long misadventure in Islamic nation-building. The appetite for taking on the regimes that enable al-Qaeda to project outsize power was lost once the public saw that the price-tag would include precious lives and untold billions to be sunk into the dubious construction of sharia-lite democracies.
In the fallout, the hard Left recovered its voice. In early 2004, Howard Dean — who was then leading the Democratic presidential field and would go on to become chairman of the Democratic National Committee — explained that he could not judge what should befall bin Laden because the terror master had not yet had a fair trial and been convicted by a jury. Those in “positions of executive power,” he declaimed, should not “prejudge jury trials.”
Similarly, the ever-malleable Eric Holder, Clinton’s deputy attorney general, was back to portraying Bush counterterrorism as a borderline criminal exercise in Constitution-shredding. Immediately after 9/11, when Democrats had been anxious to prove they could be just as tough on terrorists as Bush, Holder had admonished a CNN host that “we are in the middle of a war,” and thus that captured terrorists should be detained without trial as “combatants” — in addition to being denied Geneva Convention rights so that “we . . . have an opportunity to interrogate them and find out what their future plans might be, where other cells are located.” But by 2008, while serving as a senior adviser to the Obama campaign, Holder was bemoaning Bush’s failure to treat captured terrorists “in accordance with the Geneva Conventions,” and condemning Bush counterterrorism as a green light for “torture” and a betrayal of the “rule of law.” One wonders what the attorney general will make of the fact that the intelligence derived from interrogating detainees proved essential in confirming bin Laden’s location for yesterday’s successful operation.
Obama himself campaigned on promises to end Bush counterterrorism, shutter Gitmo, and return to Clinton’s law-enforcement approach. There was a caveat, though, an indication that he had learned something from Clinton’s missteps. The candidate promised that he would attack al-Qaeda havens, focusing particularly on Pakistan — which he limned as especially unreliable. The then-senator warned that if Pakistan’s government did not clean up its own mess, he would not hesitate to attack its terrorist redoubts.
For his stance, the McCain campaign poked fun at his purportedly reckless provocation of ally. As some of us said at the time, however, Obama was entirely right.
There is much fault to find in Obama’s overall approach to the Islamist threat. His management of the vaunted “Arab Spring” has been incoherent, and there is dizzying discord between his rhetoric and actions when it comes to what “justice” for terrorists should entail — gold-plated due process for 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed versus lethal special forces for 9/11 maestro bin Laden. Nevertheless, Obama has clearly figured out that arrest warrants and subpoenas are not going to get it done in places like Islamabad, and that if a U.S. president is not clear in his directions to kill the jihad’s lead actors, it is they who will do the killing.
The slaying of this monster, the peerless capability of our armed forces it reaffirms, and the demonstration of national unity it has sparked, make this a great day for our country. They suggest, moreover, something else worth celebrating: the outlines of an effective, practical, and economic counterterrorism.
The criminal-justice system is not a deterrent to foreign terror networks that are bivouacked outside our country and thus outside the jurisdiction of its investigative agencies and courts. Nor are nation-building enterprises the answer: They are prohibitively costly in blood and treasure; they inspire sharia-based attacks against us; and they won’t make us safer — terrorists are expert at exploiting the freedoms available in democratic societies, and there is no reason to believe that country A’s becoming a democracy would make country B safer from jihadist terror. The future will not belong to the law-enforcement approach or the democracy project.
It will belong to small-scale special-forces operations that target top jihadists and their cells. It will entail diplomatic pressure and, when necessary, limited military engagements against terror-sponsoring regimes. It will feature less indulgence of faux allies like Pakistan, which do more to aid than confront the jihad. It will fashion a new legal system for the indefinite detention of al-Qaeda operatives who, for intelligence reasons, cannot or should not be tried in civilian courts. And it will require aggressive prosecution of al-Qaeda imitators inside our country, as well as those who materially support terrorists.
That’s the justice that reflects enduring American values. Here’s hoping we’ll someday remember May 1, 2011, as the day the nation came together around it — amid a warm glow of patriotism and a monumental defeat for our enemies.
|
|
shut up and pull
climber
|
|
OBAMA WANTS HIGHER GAS PRICES. THIS IS ALL PLANNED.
READ THE QUOTES FROM HIS ENERGY SECRETARY.
|
|
shut up and pull
climber
|
|
Mark Steyn on America
Wednesday, 04 May 2011
"It’s Back!”
So goes Walmart’s new slogan. What they mean is the old Walmart is back — “Everyday low prices!” — and their disastrous attempt to evolve into Goremart — “Every quarter higher losses!” — is over. Five years ago, Walmart hired an Al Gore adviser as PR chief, stripped the stores of déclassé products such as fishing tackle, and filled it up with a lot of stuff that was “green-friendly.” The Sierra Club and The New Yorker said nice things about them, and Mr. and Mrs. America stayed away. As former exec Jimmy Wright told the Wall Street Journal, “The basic Walmart customer didn’t leave Walmart. What happened is that Walmart left the customer.”
Walmart went green into the red, and then realized that they couldn’t afford the Al Gore retail model. There’s a lot of that around. Before the big Gulf spill, BP had spent a decade kissing up to Democrats and eco-progressives. Once upon a time, their initials stood for “British Petroleum,” but some Madison Avenue type thought it would look better to adopt the slogan “Beyond Petroleum” and replace their old logo with a flower. A pansy? Not yet. Just a sunflower. My colleague Jonah Goldberg suggested that, after the Demo-mediacracy effortlessly turned Tony Hayward into an oleaginous Snidely Whiplash, BP ought to own their rep and call themselves “Badass Petroleum.” Exactly: “We love to drill — and it shows!”
Corporations pretending to be social workers is bad enough. But, even in the decadent phase of capitalism, the market still functions well enough to bring Walmart to its senses in a mere half decade. Alas, for Big Government, there are no such corrective mechanisms. The government of the United States is currently borrowing over $4 billion a day. The Republicans recently secured an alleged landmark victory over Democrats that cut 38-point-something billion dollars from the budget. How many weeks of clenched-teeth high-stakes brinkmanship did it take to negotiate about nine days’ worth of cuts?
Did I say nine days’ worth? Oh, wait. That was on Friday night. By the following Tuesday afternoon, over half of the $38.5 billion had been exposed as various meaningless sleights of hand of which government, unlike Walmart, can avail itself very easily — for example, counting money in the Justice Department’s crime victims’ reserve fund that was never scheduled to be spent this year as a “savings” of $4.9 billion. Real savings — that’s to say, the kind that would pass muster according to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles — were around $14 billion — or, in other words, less than the U.S. government borrowed in the four days between the announcing of the “historic cuts” and their exposure as utterly fraudulent. A couple of days later, the "real" savings were down to about three hundred million - or about what the government borrows in less time than it takes a Congressional stenographer to type up the bill.
But assume for the sake of argument that that $14 billion were correct. If it takes four days to agree on two and a half days’ worth of “cuts,” how much time and energy and political capital would the Republicans have to expend to negotiate a budget reduction of, say, $300 billion? Whoa, steady on, man. That’s big bucks, a third of a trillion: We’d be tagged as “extremists.” Whereas borrowing $300 billion isn’t in the least bit “extreme”: It takes two and a half months, and it’s business as usual.
But somehow cutting it is beyond the bounds of political reality. And so as the ship fills up with water we congratulate ourselves on agreeing to pass out the thimbles.
The sheer variety of ingenious accounting wheezes used to dream up that $38.5 billion illustrates what we’re up against. I quote from National Journal:
White House officials said throughout the process that the composition of the cuts was more important than the top-line number, and that including mandatory cuts allowed that top line to grow while limiting the immediate impact of the cuts.
(My emphasis. Also my rolled eyeballs. And my mirthless guffaw.)
Do you know what that means? Hey, don’t bother: The “top line” is growing, while the baseline is also up. As they say in the small ads in the alternative weekly, are you a top or a base? Neither of the above? Don’t worry, I’m sure somewhere in between there’s a mid-line (the waterline?) where various “extremist” “cuts” are being enacted.
The first developed nation to get clobbered by the downturn was Iceland. It has 300,000 people. America has 300 million. If you have big government in a nation of 300,000 or even 10 million (Portugal), it’s relatively easy to figure out how much money you’re spending and on what. But, as that mythical $38.5 billion “cut” illustrates, in an ever more centralized, de-federalized nation of 300 million, meaningful oversight is all but impossible.
Meanwhile, USA Today reports that even a third of Republican voters say “the government should not try to control the costs of Medicare.”
Oh. Okay.
Where do this third of Republican voters live? Iowa? New Hampshire? And if you were a second-tier candidate trying to break out from the rest of the also-rans, mightn’t you be tempted to position yourself as their champion?
What happens if the government follows the advice of that third of Republicans and declines to “control the costs of Medicare”? The dollar dies as global currency, followed by inflation, the wiping out of your savings, widespread social unrest, huge increases in crime and violence, Mad Max on I-95 . . .
The question is whether enough Americans are willing to grow up — and fast: That’s to say, will they mature before the debt does? Forget the top line and the baseline: The bottom line is that it’s the end of the line.
|
|
shut up and pull
climber
|
|
In a sign of one major internal difference, Mr. Chu has called for gradually ramping up gasoline taxes over 15 years to coax consumers into buying more-efficient cars and living in neighborhoods closer to work.
“Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe,” Mr. Chu, who directs the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal in September.
|
|
Brandon-
climber
The Granite State.
|
|
|
Topic Author's Reply - May 5, 2011 - 02:13pm PT
|
Can they not be dualistic?
Duality defines us these days.
|
|
Karl Baba
Trad climber
Yosemite, Ca
|
|
It's quite obvious that mistakes are made in reporting and conveying information. Anyone who has been around an incident and then read about it in the paper knows amazing disconnections happen with journalists.
On the other hand, "We were mistaken" is the first excuse of someone caught in a lie. At first, when Gulf of Tonkin was exposed as not happening and when WMDs were not found in Iraq, the government claimed mistakeness. Later, when more evidence surfaced showing that the government knew and used the incidents to go to war anyway, it was decades later and nobdy wanted to go back and sound an alarm or punish anyone.
So we have to be careful, particularly when the Military has plainly used disinformation and psy-ops to influence people.
So when the Government announced that Bin Laden was armed and used a woman as a shield, they later said they were mistaken. REALLY? This is a HUGE story and they had time to thoroughly debrief the Seals, test OBL's DNA, and the incidence was recorded. How could they get it wrong? Perhaps because the raid and killing is more legal if he was armed and has more impact if we can paint him as a coward?
Or maybe an honest mistake.
Of course there are greater questions about how the guy escaped capture for many years and was found in the lap of our allies military town.
Total Speculation: Ex CIA asset Bin Laden agrees to shut up and take the heat for 9-11 in exchange for the removal of US forces from Saudi Arabia (his main demand, which we actually did remove them) and not successfully hunting him down so he cozied up with the our allies in the Pakistan Military. Then he either died of natural causes and was put on ice or was chilling in Pakistan until we came to whack him. (possibly the reason this compound was hardly defended) I don't believe the above scenario but I don't believe the status quo version of the whole Bin Laden story either cause it's full of holes and lack of evidence. It's been 10 years, why not release some data?
Peace
karl
|
|
Crimpergirl
Sport climber
Boulder, Colorado!
|
|
Media as in plural, as in an institution. I see that as very different than the smallest single component of it (a person).
It is my belief that institutions have a primary purpose. Of course, they may have secondary ones as well. And they may have the publicly declared ones too. Is Fox News in it to present Fair and Balanced information or are they in it to deliver viewers to advertisers? (I only mention them as I can't remember other groups stated purposes...no tv signal in this house).
Given my experience (and research and corresponding literature about it for whatever that is worth), the media (as in plural and as in institution) has the #1 purpose of delivering viewers to advertisers.
Big audiences = big money. If not one watches, there is no money and the entity craters. If few were on facebook, Zuckerberg wouldn't be a gadzillionaire. If few watched Glen Beck, he'd be taken off the air (uh oh!). If people stopped watching CNN in big numbers, it'd go away.
I'm certainly open to hearing others thoughts on this. Maybe I'm wrong.
edit: I'm trying to be nice DMT!!! :)
|
|
BrianH
Trad climber
santa fe
|
|
Karl Baba is the new Izzy Stone!!! Who knew???
In 1964, using evidence drawn from a close reading and analysis of published accounts, Stone was the only American journalist to challenge President Johnson's account of the Gulf of Tonkin incident. During the 1960s, Stone continued to criticize the Vietnam War. At its peak in the 1960s, the Weekly had a circulation of about 70,000,[12] yet it was regarded as very influential.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I._F._Stone
|
|
BrianH
Trad climber
santa fe
|
|
You're saying there is zero journalistic integrity? None, zero, zip?
Are ALL doctors now just in it for the money?
Are all lawyers ambulance chasers?
Is ever single politician a duplicates, selfish man interested in nothing but power?
Is every cop also crooked?
That's one heck of a leap.
But from what I've seen recently, it doesn't seem as many true journalists are working for the corporate controlled mass media anyway. Many are tweeting from places like Libya, Yemen and the like. Or they have web outlets that aren't owned by a corporate monolith. They are producing their own stories, finding the facts on the own and reporting to a much smaller audience.
These corporations have a legal mandate to maximize profit. All other considerations (such as fact checking, and balance) are subordinate, and the profit imperative will trump when necessary.
As for the other professions, each is a unique case, and there are good and bad apples everywhere.
|
|
shut up and pull
climber
|
|
The reason the liberals hate Fox news is because for decades the news has been fed to us by the liberals at CBS, NBC, ABC, NPR, the NY Times, the LA Times, the Wash Post, and Hollywood -- now the tide has balanced a bit.
When polls are conducted at all of these news outlets, the employees and reporters are overwhelmingly Dems, hence the news always had a pro-left bent.
Now -- with Fox News, the internet, and Rush -- the left cannot dominate the news like they used to. And boy are they pissed. Its why you see so many efforts by libs to shut down views by conservatives, whether on our college campuses via speech codes, or the "Fairness Doctrine" pushed by the Dems, or the unions shouting down conservative speakers time and time again.
Libs -- you don't own the channels of speech anymore. And your tantrums to shut conservatives up only highlight the threat you folks pose to our liberties. Please -- keep screaming and trying to drown us out -- you only prove our point that liberalism, as practiced today, is the enemy of freedom.
|
|
blahblah
Gym climber
Boulder
|
|
Karl said:
So when the Government announced that Bin Laden was armed and used a woman as a shield, they later said they were mistaken. REALLY? This is a HUGE story and they had time to thoroughly debrief the Seals, test OBL's DNA, and the incidence was recorded. How could they get it wrong? Perhaps because the raid and killing is more legal if he was armed and has more impact if we can paint him as a coward?
A problem with Karl's theory is that if the US gov't was lying in the first instance about Bin Laden being armed and using a woman as a shield, why did it stop lying? There's no way that lie would have ever been exposed (I suppose Osama's daughter could have contradicted the story, but I wouldn't be too worried about that if I were the CIA operative in charge of Karl's proposed scheme).
Seems to me that the US government quickly correcting erroneous early accounts of the raid are more consistent with trying to tell the truth than lying, as the lies would not be expected to dramatically change for no good reason.
Still, I admit that I don't have a good theory as to how such an "honest mistake" could have occurred and I also find the whole thing to be troubling. The episode isn't really consistent with either a lie or an honest mistake--it's just very, very weird.
One theory, that I don't think is super-plausible and is just off the top of my head, is that the gov't does periodically inject false stories (lies), then quickly contradicts them, just so people trying to pay attention quickly realize it's a hopeless task and just give up. I'm about at that stage myself!
|
|
shut up and pull
climber
|
|
Soooo funny watching libs in here trying to give cover to Obama for all the different versions that came out about the OBL raid.
"They arent lying. They are just mistaken."
Geeez. Such trust.
|
|
jstan
climber
|
|
"Lovegasoline
Trad climber
Sh#t Hole, Brooklyn, NY
May 5, 2011 - 10:37am PT
jstan:
You still haven't answered my post question upthread.
"To interpret certain data as a lie may be a result of one's subjective bias."
When you reach an incorrect conclusion because of subjective bias you are "lying" to yourself.
So, jstan are you lying to yourself or are you telling yourself the truth?
Lay the truth on us about Bin Laden.
*I thought a lie involves intention. If one is unaware of their subjective bias is it a lie?"
LG:
I was not able to find a question. All pretty much assertions. The last line merits a response.
According to the dictionary you are correct, lies are intentional.
Now let me ask you a question.
What is the intention when one is driven by subjective bias?
I submit it is to be found "correct".
So that is the intention when one speaks from subjective bias. There is the intention.
Now to the question in your last line.
"If one is unaware of their subjective bias is it a lie?"
I think one of the first signs of maturity is the realization that everyone is subject to bias, Some more than others. So it is I harp constantly on the need to present the data underlying our opinions.
We can do something about our biases if it is our intention to do so. When arguing a point with yourself, in fact especially when arguing a point with yourself, use the data.
We become permanently trapped in our biases immediately as we forget escaping them is our primary task. Every day.
When we fail in this we become a broken record, responding in Pavlovian fashion to the voice in our head, becoming ever more certain. For some, this is a path leading to clinical illness.
|
|
Karl Baba
Trad climber
Yosemite, Ca
|
|
I think another theory is this
First you tell people what you want them to believe. It's on Page One and they have their emotional reaction.
Then you say you were mistaken and tell more of the truth. It's on page 4 and the reaction has already happened. They've done studies on this. Sometimes people cling to story one after it's already been debunked.
Peace
karl
|
|
|
SuperTopo on the Web
|
Let us know!