Watched a commercial for Koch Industries the other day on which they bragged about being all over the nation (like a huge octopus), and how they have created over 60,000 jobs for Americans. This is the biggest privately owned company in the nation and they’re bragging about 60,000 jobs. Sure that’s a lot of jobs but how many hundreds of thousand more have this supposedly American company created overseas? You don’t get to be the richest family in the country by employing only sixty thousand people. We used to have that many in one plant in Dearborn, MI. The Koch’s can blow their horn all they want but they are about as good for the country as a nose full of the good coke.
This was followed later in the day by a BP commercial talking about how they created over 250,000 jobs in the USA. Yeah, but almost all of them are cleaning up their oil spills.
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Obama is looking for 500 Billion to train fighters in Syria. The general opinion is that if Obama had done this 3 years ago Syria would not have turned into a bloody civil war. The general opinion is, as usual, wrong.
Lindsay Graham says that he Syrian people started this thing through peaceful demonstrations. As usual Lindsay doesn’t know his ass from his elbow.
Graham goes on to say that radical Islamists are hijacking the revolution. More bullshit
Radical Islamists have been the core of the opposition to the Assad regime for over 40 years. Assad’s father came to power in a coup in 1970 that ousted leftist leaders and in which he was pronounced the President of Syria. In the late 1970s he faced an armed Islamist insurgency. Hundreds were killed and in 1981 the Islamists exploded a car bomb in Damascus that killed 300 and wounded 500. In 1982 there was another uprising and the government killed between 10 and 20 thousand people in the town of Hama S
So this has been going on since long before Lindsay learned to lie. There have, over the years, been around 1,500 different Islamist organizations looking for a fight and now they all have it. They each make up an insurgency of between 75 and 115,000 fighters with an added 7,500 foreign fighters joining the fray. The most effective are all Islamist: Isis, Alal Arasgham, etc.
Now Washington wants to vet these people without even being there and give the good guys 500 billion bucks of your tax money.
To get a look at how well that will work, just take a look at how we regard ISIS now. When they are fighting the Maliki government in Iraq they are a terrorist foes of the US. But when they cross the non-existent border to Syria and attack Assad they are our ally in regime change in that embattled country.
With its history of bitter fighting it just doesn’t make sense that a small donation for arms three years ago would have actually made any difference in Syria. But to think that a infusion of cash, at this point to some group we believe to be seriously democratic and not Islamist terrorists really is going to do anything but give this bunch of bad actors more arms with which to create their own terrorist state is a completely brain dead idea.
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The President was all over The tube the other day talking about how the VA had to shape up and how we needed not just people who could do a better job but also people who would let him and his people know who wasn’t doing an adequate job. These are not finks, he intimated but good guys who were actual whistleblowers. He said they would be important to the restructuring of the VA, that they were essential to the proper conduct of that organization.
Sounds great but how does that differ from the conduct of Ed Snowden who revealed the problems with the way NSA was conducting its business and was called a traitor by Obama himself? It looks very much like a guy who tells the public about one of Obama’s favorite programs is a traitor while another guy who does the same thing about a program that Obama wants to fix is a hero. Pretty hypocritical, Barak, even for a politician.
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We just gave Israel 25 billion dollars to add to their iron dome. Why? Israel is rich enough to take care of their dome. They have the seventh best economy in the world right now and if they can’t handle it, then the Sheldon Adelsons of the world could better give their money to Israel than use it to mess up American politics. But if they really need that money then it should not be freely given but must have some strings that refer back to successful talks.. Israel made a huge mistake with the settlements. Now they are going to have to eat that mistake. Hamas has been a recurring thorn in the side of peace. Now they must be destroyed, and it would be best if that were done by the Arab nations that understand what a deterrent to peace it really is.
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Every time Ed Snowden almost fades from the news, some idiot in our intelligence community gives the go ahead for them to do something so stupid it defies description. The latest is, of course, the CIA spying on congress while it investigates, yes the CIA. CIA director Brennan denied this was possible a few weeks ago; his attitude was that the whole idea was absurd. Now he’s apologizing about it. The question is was he lying then or doesn’t he know what is going on his own agency. No mater what the answer, Brennan should be gone and should be indicted for his agency’s actions, which broke the law. The same is true for director Clapper and NSA. Clapper actually perjured himself on that one. So where the hell is AG Holder. He’s supposed to be the Attorney General. He’s supposed to prosecute crime. He should get off his ass and do his job or he should follow the other two out office and into jail.
The problem in Ferguson is very important but it’s no where near as important as the heads of government agencies committing perjury. Besides, can’t this do nothing AG do more than one thing at once? It’s not like he has no help.
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Watching a debate between Robert George of the New York Post, already a traitor to his race by being a GOP foil and Joan Walsh, both of whom think that if the president does his job it will be impeachment bait and that he maybe shouldn’t do what he is paid to do because it may make the nut case right mad. George says that by actually doing something to help the refugee crisis Obama will be further poisoning the well. Is he serious? What about doing the right thing? What about doing his job? If the GOP can’t see the reasoning behind Obama’s moves maybe they should drink the poison well water because we’d all be better off without them.
These same people when asked about a poll that shows most people are down on congress for failing them but they still favor the GOP, the group that has gridlocked congress come up with a myriad reasons as to why this is but none of them have the guts to tell us the real reason. The basic American public is stupid and uninformed about the real reasons why things are going wrong. No one listens to opposition sources of news and comment and most have very little interest in politics at all. Most people in general have the intellectual capacity of a mollusk and the range of interest of an earthworm. Those who read at all, read papers like the NY Post where a fanatically right wing British magnet tells them how to live their lives according to Dick Cheney. This happens because the real reason the buy that paper is the sports columns and page six.
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I despise Rick Perry. I think he is a dolt, a liar and a fool but the current indictment against him is ridiculous. Being indicted for getting rid of a drunken clown whose job, at which she failed, was to get rid of other drunken clowns, was probably the best move this jerk has ever made. The public servant he forced out of office should absolutely lose her job. The charges against him are unequivocally political and not legal and the DA who filed the charges, is an embarrassment to the Democratic party. There’s no sense being governor if you can’t weed out useless public servants and help the state function.
The question of whether or not this will interfere with Perry’s presidential aspirations is more than mute. Perry may have aspirations but very little chance of getting a nomination and if by some bizarre crossing of the planets, that were to happen, he will get his brains, what there is of them, beat out against almost any democratic candidate.
Whether or not Perry is right or wrong in this in-state battle, the fact remains that he is a gorilla and not to bright one. Eventually Perry will find a way to make himself look like a fool and the probability is that, that eventuality will not take too long
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Hillary and a lot of other people have been saying that Obama should have given more aid to the moderates in Syria. That doing so would have kept ISIS from getting too strong. In fact America gave a great deal of aide to the moderates.. ISIS was created in Iraq and grew out of the mess created by Maliki in that country. Maliki did everything wrong and soon ISIS gained approbation from the population and began to grow in strength.
We always try to back moderates. The problem is finding one. Our intelligence services couldn’t find a moderate group to back in the fight against Assad. The problem is that the Islamic world is trying its best to retreat to the 2nd century. They just don’t want to face a modern world that doesn’t back their fanatic religious principles.
Those who have seriously studied the situation in Syria , agree that no matter who we backed in 2011 the situation in Syria would look pretty much the same today and that the only thing that might have allayed ISIS would have been to take out Maliki in 2010 and replace him with someone who could have unified the Sunni’s and Shiites. Now Iraq has a new man in office but he will have to be a combination of Jesus Christ, Mohammad, and Confusions to make the religious fanatic groups in that ill fated country sit down and agree on anything.
Believing that earlier help for the moderates in Syria, if they could have been found, would have stopped ISIS from becoming a power is naive baloney and very dangerous talk in the current climate.
In 2007 & 2008 the Suni sheiks were dead set against the Talaban and anything like ISIS. Maliki turned them into allies of ISIS through his clumsy ignorant treatment of them. Now the problem is that we will have to dig out the ISIS fighters from the Sunni elements in the cities they now occupy. We can destroy ISIS outside the cities but they will inevitably become what the Taliban has become and we will be faced with a return to terrorist instead of army warfare. We will have to recruit new Sunni forces to take on ISIS and we are still a long way from that.
The obvious strategy is to arm the Kurds to the teeth, bomb the hell out of any ISIS forces that we can find and open talks with the Sunni tribes to convince them to help weed out any ISIS sympathizers that are hiding among them in the cities. This is a workable plan. Add to it, support of a moderate group in Syria that will oppose both ISIS and Abbas and we have a strategy for the region.
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For years I have been a backer of nuclear technology, at least theoretically. The main problems have always been nuclear waste and the greed of the people building and maintaining the facilities, Anyone who knew anything about probability knew these aging, under maintained reactors would eventually lead to Fukashima or worse. Well, now there is a new technology, invented by a couple of MIT grads that promises to eliminate all but a fraction of the regular waste, eat all the waste stored and provide a much safer plant that will eliminate many of the hazards of the current technology. All it will tale to make this technology a reality is money and belief. Let’s hope that there is enough of both in this country to make us the future leaders of this technology, because if we aren’t, the Chinese will be.
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There’s a great deal of noise being made by the GOP about Obama’s vacations and how he should drop his tennis racquet every time something new appears on the world stage. The fact is that he does, but he does it wherever he is.
With today’s communications he just doesn’t have to run back to DC every time some commander of ISIS takes a dump. While he was on his current vacation we had Ferguson, ISIS. EBOLA, Perry in Texas and an earthquake in California. If Obama reacted to each one by rushing back to the White House he would have actually spent all his time on planes not at either location. But he didn’t have to. The President is a communications center all by himself and so he is in complete communication and command wherever he is at any given moment.
As far as how many days he vacations? Obama has taken 105 vacation days to this point in this presidency. George Bush took almost 450 in is presidency to the sane point. All you have to be able to do is count. In addition, if Bush had made the right decisions in his handling of Iraq, Obama would not have to waste his vacation days on it now.