Gary Sick has offered the following reading of latest US policy, with private manoeuvres and public “spin”, on Iran’s nuclear programme and sanctions.
My own reaction is that this is “too clever by half”, not on the part of the author but as attributed to Washington. As I wrote Sick, “Could it be that there there are two factions still battling within the Administraton? One faction, probably coming out of the State Department, is not as keen on aggressive sanctions. Linked to this is a wish to move the debate to the human rights rather than nuclear focus. The other faction, probably in the National Security Council and Department of Defense, is keener on a sanctions-first, nuclear-first focus. So they use New York Times as the ventriloquist’s dummy for their line. I’m not sure Obama is a central player in this battle.”
Sick’s concise response: “One of the great benefits of strategic leaking is that it conceals the real intentions of the leakers, thereby leaving interpretation up to the observer.”
Pretend for a moment that you are the president of the United States and you have gotten yourself into a bit of a hole with your Iran policy.
First you offered to negotiate with Iran over nuclear (and potentially other) issues without the Bush preconditions. But there were powerful political forces that felt this was an example of your inexperience and even appeasement tendencies. So you unwisely accepted a six month deadline for the negotiations to show that you meant business. You tried to soften that by saying you would take another look at the issue at the end of the year, but everyone ignored that and let you know that January 1 was the drop-dead date to solve all the negotiating problems with Iran. Read the rest of this entry »
There’s nothing notable anymore about Glenn Beck’s ravings — how often can you pretend to set someone on fire, use the ghost of Tom Paine to call Barack Obama a fascist, or cry about “what life used to be like”?), be they a quest for fame and lots of money, political psychosis, or genuine bats*** craziness. However, this video from Crooks and Liars elevates Beck’s latest conspiracy theory of “Barack Obama’s Six Degrees of Separation from Mao Zedong” by mashing it up with the 1970s wisdom of the famous scientist Miss Anne Elk:
UPDATE 1245 GMT: German Chancellor Angela Merkel, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Israeli President Shimon Peres, and Afghan President Hamid Karzai have all offered congratulations. The Taliban, however, are ruining the party: “We have seen no change in his strategy for peace. He has done nothing for peace in Afghanistan”
UPDATE 1135 GMT: Another reader jumps in, “I’m positive. He has given us hope, gives it still.”
UPDATE 1035 GMT: An EA contributor is in the midst of a heated discussion on Facebook. Most of the reaction is far from thrilled: “are you serious?”, “farcical”, “very ridiculous”. This, from our contributor, is the sharpest point: “The Nobel prize has a very good rationale if it is awarded to people who are persecuted because of their activities, such as Shirin Ebadi, Chinese dissidents, Ms. Maguire, etc. It makes no sense whatsoever to assign it to some who is well-fed, well-protected, in favour of troop rises in Afghanistan, and who wins it for 1 speech in Cairo and another one in the UN containing vague promises on nuclear disarmament, becoming buddies with the Islamic world, and other assorted dreams. It’s actually almost pathetic…”
EA Staffer #1: Wonder what folks in Afghanistan think?
A Reader: How can Obama get the Nobel Peace Prize hours before the US is supposed to bomb the Moon?! Read the rest of this entry »
Words cannot describe the experience of watching Fox’s man-over-the-edge and an “expert” with a large tie explain how Shi’a Islam, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the 12th Imam add up to genocide and nuclear annihiliation. However, I await Beck’s next tin-hat analysis: “Why Pre-Milliennialist Christians Are Waving Hello to the Apocalypse”.
(Did the Expert with a Tie really say, “Jesus forces people to convert [to Islam] or die”? And has he coined the term for the next social movement: “Secret Closet Twelver”?)
Last week the New York Timespublished an article detailing the Pentagon’s plan to shift focus away from international terrorism, known under the previous administration as the Global War on Terror, towards larger strategic threats to the United States such as destabilized governments and mass refugee crises provoked by climate change. Most in the defense establishment welcome this shift in strategy, but the threat from terrorism still remains.
This time, however, there is a difference. The terror threat comes largely not from foreign nationals but from Americans.
In 2009 almost 70 Americans, including police officers and medical personnel, have been killed by domestic terror attacks. This is a breathtakingly sharp rise from 2008, when only two people lost their lives, both of whom died at the hands of anti-Liberal terrorist Jim D. Adkisson in Tennessee. The first attack in 2009 was in Samson, Alabama, when Michael McLendon went on a cross-county shooting rampage that killed 11 people including himself. The most recent was on June 10, when James von Brunn opened fire inside the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, killing one guard and wounding several others.
While each of these attacks is unique, they can be roughly broken down into a handful of categories. In this piece, we will explore these terrorist archetypes, the ecosystem that produced them, as well as common tactics, both harmful and helpful, used to counter them. The intention is to provide students, analysts and researchers, with a sound and coherent image of the domestic terror threat facing the United States.
Our favourite delusional paranoid and/or talk-show shyster, Glenn Beck, reworks the poem about the Jews, leaping from the AIG financial services group to the auto industry, to prove that Obama/Hitler is “coming after you”:
Yes, folks, you read that right. Get excited: when Texas declares independence from the liberally decadent United States, its first leader will be the star of Missing in Action, Delta Force, Chuck Norris Meets the Martians, and, of course, Walker: Texas Ranger.
A poll by Research 2000 this week found that Republicans in Texas are now evenly split on “independence”, with 48 percent favouring secession from the US and 48 percent opposing. Weak-kneed Democrats pull the overall figure for independence down to 35 percent, but we’re sure Mr Norris’s support for secession, backed by a few well-placed kicks, will start changing minds. Read the rest of this entry »
Gary Sick has offered the following reading of latest US policy, with private manoeuvres and public “spin”, on Iran’s nuclear programme and sanctions. 
Yes, folks, you read that right. Get excited: when Texas declares independence from the liberally decadent United States, its first leader will be 
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