Don't post personal information you don't want people seeing, dumbass (that means you!)
0 Members and 3 Guests are viewing this topic.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/9287715/Israeli-anti-immigration-riots-hit-African-neighbourhood-of-Tel-Aviv.html
Mr. Obama has concluded that even if there is a resolution to the current standoff over Crimea and eastern Ukraine, he will never have a constructive relationship with Mr. Putin, aides said. As a result, Mr. Obama will spend his final two and a half years in office trying to minimize the disruption Mr. Putin can cause, preserve whatever marginal cooperation can be saved and otherwise ignore the master of the Kremlin in favor of other foreign policy areas where progress remains possible.“That is the strategy we ought to be pursuing,” said Ivo H. Daalder, formerly Mr. Obama’s ambassador to NATO and now president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “If you just stand there, be confident and raise the cost gradually and increasingly to Russia, that doesn’t solve your Crimea problem and it probably doesn’t solve your eastern Ukraine problem. But it may solve your Russia problem.”...In effect, Mr. Obama is retrofitting for a new age the approach to Moscow that was first set out by the diplomat George F. Kennan in 1947 and that dominated American strategy through the fall of the Soviet Union. The administration’s priority is to hold together an international consensus against Russia, including even China, its longtime supporter on the United Nations Security Council.While Mr. Obama’s long-term approach takes shape, though, a quiet debate has roiled his administration over how far to go in the short term. So far, economic advisers and White House aides urging a measured approach have won out, prevailing upon a cautious president to take one incremental step at a time out of fear of getting too far ahead of skittish Europeans and risking damage to still-fragile economies on both sides of the Atlantic.
The tiresome futurism of Obama, his dogmatic views about what this ritualistically ballyhooed century will be like and what it will not be like, are only a part of what lowers his vision. The bigger problem is that the president feels inconvenienced by history. It refuses to follow his program for it. It regularly exasperates him and regularly disappoints him. It flows when he wants it to ebb and it ebbs when he wants it flow. Like Mr. Incredible, the president is flummoxed that the world won’t stay saved, or agree to be saved at all. After all, he came to save it. And so the world has only itself to blame if Obama is sick of it and going home.
The Ukrainians, the Syrians, the Iranians, the Israelis, the Palestinians, the Egyptians, the Saudis, the Moldovans, the Poles, the Czechs, the Japanese, the Taiwanese, the Baltic populations: they are all living with the jitters, and some of them on the cusp of despair, because the United States seems no longer reliable in emergencies, which it prefers to meet with meals ready to eat.
A lot of armchair Presidents poo-poo Obama's decisions on this matter, but not too many of them actually have any worthwhile suggestions for what he should be doing instead.
You know, I can never tell if Obama is supposed to be an iron-fisted autocrat who crushes his enemies with jack-booted thugs or a quivering lump of man-flesh too scared to crawl out from under his covers at night.
Scandal: The omnipresent power behind the throne some have called the president's Rasputin had the power to call off three strikes against Osama bin Laden. She may have used that power again the night four Americans died in Benghazi.The Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attack on our diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, came while America failed to mount a rescue mission despite sufficient time and assets. Included in that disaster were the unaccounted whereabouts of President Obama during eight critical hours, the lack of Situation Room photos, the failure by the president to follow up with subordinates before his trip to Las Vegas and the fabricated story that the whole thing was prompted by an Internet video....One of the people Obama always talks to is Valerie Jarrett. She emerged from the same Chicago cauldron of radicalism where Obama got his ideological baptism.The Iranian-born Jarrett (her parents were American-born expatriates) is the only staff member who regularly follows the president home from the West Wing to the residence and one of the few people allowed to call the president by his first name.Her influence is shown by an account in Richard Miniter's book "Leading From Behind: The Reluctant President and the Advisors Who Decide for Him."It relates that at the urging of Jarrett, Obama canceled the operation to kill Osama bin Laden three times before approving the Navy SEAL mission in Pakistan on May 2, 2011. Seems she was concerned about political harm to Obama if the mission failed.Miniter writes that the president canceled the kill mission in January 2011, again in February and a third time in March, in each instance at the urging of Jarrett. Miniter cites a source within the Joint Special Operations Command who had direct knowledge of the operation and its planning.Edward Klein, author of "The Amateur," a best-selling book about Obama, asked Obama if he ran every decision by Jarrett, and the president responded, "Absolutely."A former foreign editor of Newsweek and editor of the New York Times Magazine, Klein describes Jarrett as "ground zero in the Obama operation, the first couple's friend and consigliere."Did Obama run the Benghazi decision not to send help past Jarrett that night?We do know Obama had a face-to-face briefing from Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, early in the evening.After dinner in his living quarters, Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu discussed Iran and other issues in a two-hour phone call.Present as the call was made, reports blogger Chip Jones at Conservative Report Online, was Valerie Jarrett, who, as the call was ending, went from the living quarters to the White House Situation Room, where the attack in Benghazi was being monitored by Dempsey, Panetta and other top-ranking officials.What she may have said and whether the president sent her is unknown. We do know the president retired for the night, and no rescue mission was launched.Once before, Jarrett had called off the military for political purposes. She may have done it that night as well — an action that would answer many questions and may be what the White House is really hiding.
Sunday’s Channel 10 report was not the first to assert a secret US-Iran channel involving Obama aide Jarrett. In November of 2012, the daily Yedioth Ahronoth said Jarrett — a Chicago lawyer born in Shiraz, Iran, to American parents, and good friend of Obama’s — was “a key figure in secret contacts the White House is conducting with the Iranian regime.”That report said “Jarrett served as the personal and direct emissary of the president to secret meetings with the Iranians, which are understood to have taken place in one of the Gulf principalities.”
Valerie Jarrett headed Obama’s transition team and personally vetted communist Van Jones and all the other extremists Obama has appointed.In his book “The Amateur,” Edward Klein points out that Jarrett is the power behind the throne who sits in on every meeting, decides who gets to see the president and monitors who is loyal to Obama and who needs to be gotten rid of. The president reportedly doesn’t make a move without her, and she was the single roadblock to getting bin Laden.Her religious leanings are not clear. The media either have not asked or have not gotten an answer. Many have speculated and others have denied that she, like Obama, is a closet Muslim.What is clear is that she not only has communist contacts but she is a point man for the Administration in meetings with Muslim activists.Interestingly enough, Jarrett was named Iranian of the Day in August 2008 by Iranian.com.She has been associated with the Obamas since their early days in Chicago, and those familiar with her background say that she provided crucial financial backing that helped Obama raise his national profile.Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, has a chief aide who is connected to the Muslim Brotherhood in Huma Abedeen. Could Obama’s chief adviser, the woman who has been described as co-president, be a Muslim ringer as well?The brief article on Iranian.com says Jarrett is Shirazi, but it is unclear whether the writer means that she was born in Shiraz, Iran, or that she is a member of the Swahili subgroup called Shirazi. The article calls her “African-American and Chicago royalty.” Links in the article to further information go to a mere blank page.It is in this way that to a large extent, the woman pulling the strings at the White House is as much a mystery as the president himself.
in b4 "family issues" cause Kerry to resign.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/04/27/exclusive-kerry-warns-israel-could-become-an-apartheid-state.html(Image removed from quote.)(Image removed from quote.)
"As long as in this territory west of the Jordan river there is only one political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic," Barak said. "If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state."
“A two-state solution will be clearly underscored as the only real alternative. Because a unitary state winds up either being an apartheid state with second-class citizens—or it ends up being a state that destroys the capacity of Israel to be a Jewish state,” Kerry told the group of senior officials and experts from the U.S., Western Europe, Russia, and Japan. “Once you put that frame in your mind, that reality, which is the bottom line, you understand how imperative it is to get to the two-state solution, which both leaders, even yesterday, said they remain deeply committed to.”
In the statement that Mr. Kerry issued Monday, which bore the title “On Support for Israel,” he said that he had been a staunch supporter of Israel during his years as a senator and had spent many hours since working with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials.“For more than 30 years in the United States Senate, I didn’t just speak words in support of Israel,” Mr. Kerry said in his statement. “I walked the walk when it came time to vote and when it came time to fight.”Mr. Kerry added that he did not believe that Israel was an “apartheid state” or intended to become one. Mr. Kerry did not dispute he had used the phrase but said it had led to a “misimpression” about his views.“If I could rewind the tape, I would have chosen a different word to describe my firm belief that the only way in the long term to have a Jewish state and two nations and two peoples living side by side in peace and security is through a two state solution,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/29/world/middleeast/kerry-apologizes-for-remark-that-israel-risks-apartheid.html?_r=0
Joseph Nye, North American chairman of the Trilateral Commission, sent Kerry a letter profusely apologizing: "I am very distressed that Mr. Rogin somehow gained entrance to the meeting room but also that he blatantly ignored the clearly stated rules we had established and under which you agreed to appear before the Commission. His actions tarnish the Commission's excellent reputation for honoring this pledge and that of all those who attended the session and did keep it."
More than 1,500 people have died in their attacks so far this year.
Nah. Id prefer Nigeria to sort this out on their own unless they specifically demand our help.
honestly the whole "hashtag major foreign events" thing has always been wack. An effortless way to show you care about shit you probably don't care about. Not saying Michelle doesn't care, just talking broadly.
Quote from: Esch on May 08, 2014, 10:28:16 AMNah. Id prefer Nigeria to sort this out on their own unless they specifically demand our help.i dont think a u.s. situation is gonna work out ideal because it never does, but as far as the nigerian government taking care of it? the presidents wife had her own "protest" the other day, where she called for an end to all other protests - in the name of peace - and then had the protest leaders arrested. so...
