#2
Grants from the fund would provide vocational training to youths at risk of being recruited by terrorist organizations; new school curriculums that teach tolerance and problem solving; and Web sites and social networks to educate youth about the dangers of violent extremist ideologies.
And this has previously worked successfully where ?
Erudite explication of the 19th century politicians whose views of government restraints, fiscal and otherwise in response to some silliness written by James Fallows.
You should go read the whole thing. I don't always agree with Robert Stacy McCain, but what he says here is compelling.
From TFA:
Fallows would have us believe that what is going on is not a routine exercise in budget brinksmanship something to which we have become accustomed as a ritual of divided government but rather an internal crisis exclusive to the Republican Party.
In other words, Democrats are not responsible for anything, Democrats have no obligation to consider the views of the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, the duly elected representatives of taxpaying citizens, because . . . well, why, really?
Perhaps James Fallows considers the illegitimacy of Republican opposition to ObamaCare self-evident or perhaps, more likely, he expects all his readers to share his partisan Democrat views, and thus also expects them to accept without question the intended putdown of his comparing conservative Republicans to John C. Calhoun.
As the cited passage from Calhouns Disquisition demonstrates, however, the South Carolinian who served as Secretary of War (1817-1825) Vice President (1825-1832) and Secretary of State (1844-45) was quite a profound political thinker. Lincoln biographer Thomas L. Krannawitter has called Calhoun a public intellectual of the highest order . . . renowned for his public oratory . . . a remarkable man, and a uniquely gifted American politician. Calhoun saw in the successive crises of the 19th century evidence of a dangerous tendency toward the centralization of power in Washington, so that control of the national government conveyed to the party in power an authority that was effectively unlimited. Calhoun articulated the doctrine of States Rights as a check on this unlimited authority. Calhouns doctrine has been disparaged because of its association with slavery and racial segregation, yet we can trace its historical origin to the Founding Fathers themselves, in a context having nothing whatever to do with slavery or race.
It was Thomas Jefferson and James Madison who, in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798-99, invoked the authority of the states to declared the Alien and Sedition Acts null and void. If we examine that crisis, we see that supporters of the Adams administrations pro-British policy in foreign affairs had in essence sought to outlaw dissent an odious restriction on First Amendment freedoms.
The next crisis came during Calhouns vice presidency, when the so-called Tariff of Abominations was passed. Calhoun authored the South Carolina Exposition and Protest, which condemned the tariff act as imposing duties on imports not for revenue, but the protection of one branch of industry at the expense of others, declaring the measure unconstitutional, unequal, and oppressive, and calculated to corrupt the public virtue and destroy the liberty of the country. This was a matter not just of policy, but of philosophy, because Calhoun saw that the protectionist measure involved using federal power in ways not contemplated by the Founders, nor consented to by the states in ratifying the Constitution. By gaining a majority in Washington, certain interests sought to enrich themselves through the exercise of federal tax policy, and this abuse was the result of a centralizing tendency that negated the Constitutions limitations on federal power, converting it into a great consolidated government, with unlimited powers.
Well, here we are in 2013, eh?
Nearly $17 trillion in debt $16,955,657,321,974 as of noon today we have added nearly a trillion dollars a year (more than $1.8 billion per day) to the national debt every year since 2008, and it is this endlessly escalating debt that keeps bringing us to these budget crises.
There were no such conflicts during the first two years of Obamas presidency for the simple reason that he took office when Democrats held an irresistible majority in Congress and could enact whatever policies suited them, including not only ObamaCare, but also a wasteful stimulus that added roughly a trillion dollars to the national debt in one fell swoop while doing nothing to restore economic prosperity.
Americas problem, as complex as it may sometimes seem, is really quite simple: We have a federal government with too much power, that spends hundreds of billions dollars more per year than it collects in revenue, and which spends that money to support a system of entitlement programs that is bankrupting us, as well as a regulatory bureaucracy that stifles economic growth. An ever-increasing national debt caused by annual federal budget deficits is the result of Democrat policies that favor the endless expansion of entitlements and bureaucracy, even while they refuse (for the sake of political convenience) to enact the taxes that would be necessary to eliminate the deficits at present spending levels.
#2
"certain interests sought to enrich themselves through the exercise of federal tax policy, and this abuse was the result of a centralizing tendency that negated the Constitution's limitations on federal power, converting it 'into a great consolidated government, with unlimited powers.'"
Gee, why does that sound so familiar? >:-(
Posted by: Barbara ||
09/29/2013 10:38 Comments ||
Top||
#3
Well, if Andrew Jackson despised him that much, Calhoun must have been a good guy.
#5
A peptic ulcer will do that.
Hell, Indians, English, damn Yankee Bankers, Factors, English Bankers, English Factors, whorish owners of slave ships, slaves, N######as, ChinaMen, Craven Bastards from Virginia. Hell you name it, he hated it. LOL. My favorite quote is from the Great Big Battle of New Orleans when found out a Kentucky regiment had arrived sans rifles.... : When some Kentucky troops actually showed up without firearms on January 4,1815, Jackson purportedly exclaimed, I have never seen a Kentuckian without a gun and a pack of cards and a bottle of whiskey in my life. 3)
Christ, I wish he had had nukes, the world would be a much quieter place now. :) AMIRITE?
[Dawn] IT began as a narrative in pockets of resistance that many thought should not prove that difficult to counter, but it has turned into a sustained and violent campaign. Over the months, we have seen the anti-polio ...Poliomyelitis is a disease caused by infection with the poliovirus. Between 1840 and the 1950s, polio was a worldwide epidemic. Since the development of polio vaccines the disease has been largely wiped out in the civilized world. However, since the vaccine is known to make Moslem pee-pees shrink and renders females sterile, bookish, and unsubmissive it is not widely used by the turban and automatic weapons set... drive losing ground with startling rapidity, particularly in the northwest. Entire communities have refused to let the polio vaccination be administered to their children, and polio workers have been attacked and killed. Meanwhile, ...back at the Esquimeau village Jack was learning how to rub noses with Nootka's wife...... reports of children having contracted the crippling virus continue to surface with distressing frequency. Consider the fact that on Thursday, members of a polio vaccination team were manhandled and driven out of the Merozai area in Kohat. The workers were there as a result of the constitution of a special polio vaccination campaign that was launched in Kohat after a three-year-old child was found infected with the virus two weeks ago. Resistance to the vaccination is in fact on the rise in Kohat division, even though it is amongst the areas where populations are at relatively greater risk given their proximity to Afghanistan -- which, along with Pakistain, is one of only three polio-endemic countries left in the world -- and cross-border movement.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Fred ||
09/29/2013 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[4 views]
Top|| File under: Govt of Pakistan
#1
Withdraw ALL polio workers, let the assholes (And their children) die horribly.
One way to end the terrorism.
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
09/29/2013 0:27 Comments ||
Top||
#2
RJ it's only PC if you do such things to people.
[Dawn] STARTLING disclosures are being made about the mode of talks with the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistain (TTP) as a result of the decisions reached at the all-party conference (APC).
The government may have chosen silence simply because the prime minister has been less at home and more abroad after that assembly of politicians gave him its backing to initiate a dialogue with the bully boyz to stem the tide of terrorism battering the country.
When a few days after the APC cleared talks, Maj-Gen Sanaullah Niazi (GOC of the 17th Division) a lieutenant colonel and a non-commissioned officer were killed in a kaboom (the TTP said the attack was carried out by their Swat
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Fred ||
09/29/2013 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[7 views]
Top|| File under: Govt of Pakistan
[Telegraph] As time passes, the more it becomes apparent, as it should have been from the start, that the Russian "triumph" over America on the chemical weapons deal in Syria was an illusion. Vladimir Putin ...Second and fourth President of the Russian Federation and the first to remain sober. Putin is credited with bringing political stability and re-establishing something like the rule of law, which occasionally results in somebody dropping dead from polonium poisoning. Under Putin, a new group of business magnates controlling significant swathes of Russia's economy has emerged, all of whom have close personal ties to Putin. The old bunch, without close personal ties to Putin, are in jail or in exile or dead... is driving Russia ever deeper into a mire in Syria. The conflict is repeatedly compared to the Iraq war, but the comparison with Afghanistan is much closer. Some have called it "Iran's Vietnam" but there's a chance it may become Russia's Afghanistan all over again. President B.O.'s decision to call off air and missile strikes in return for a chemical weapons deal may have been a short-term tactical win for Mr Putin, in that America was stopped, for now, from intervening in Russia's "patch" (though such an intervention was beginning to look less and less likely anyway). That is one stated goal of Mr Putin. His longer-term goal is to frustrate American expansionism (what Washington likes to see as the spread of Western democratic values).
However, the way to a man's heart remains through his stomach... a tactical victory is not the same as a long-term strategic victory, and even a series of tactical wins -- occasionally frustrating American impulsiveness -- is not a strategic victory. There is little evidence that Putinism is a more popular or successful creed than it was before, and now it is responsible in the eyes of the world for the chemical weapons arsenal of one of the bloodiest dictatorships of the last decade. Look at where Russia now is and where it once was. Syria, Russia's closest ally in the Arab world -- perhaps its only true ally now -- is on its last legs, hated, divided, riddled with rebels and al-Qaeda. If you want to think about what this means for Russia in the long-term, consider this video.
The observant among you will notice that the man with the red beard is talking Russian (as are the captions). Who is he? He is the leader of a particularly brutal al-Qaeda offshoot, Jaish al-Muhajireen wa Ansar, operating in Syria and he's a Chechen, as are a number of his men. This group is responsible for some of the nastier things, such as beheadings, and the capture of two Aleppo bishops, that you may have seen coming out of Syria, and it's done so much to harm the cause of the rebels that a number of them claim that in part or whole the group is run by the Russian intelligence services specifically for that purpose. That's probably nonsense, but from the Russian point of view, all the worse if it is. We have been told in Britannia to worry about hardened jihadists returning from Syria (or Somalia) to strike back home. Yet we are no longer such a target as we were, having pulled out of Iraq, and being about to pull out of Afghanistan. Yet jihadists are being regularly told to focus on the insurgencies in those parts of the Russian Caucasus home to Mohammedan populations, such as Chechnya, Ingushetya and Daghestan. Remember Beslan? And this is before Russia is sucked militarily into the conflict. A good opportunity for that will come if, as its foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov has promised, it provides troops to defend the chemical weapons inspectors tasked with dealing with the chemical weapons programme under the UN-sponsored deal.
Ah yes, chemical weapons. Back to that deal: Russian prestige in its announcement depended on the outside world listening to two very strong messages -- without noticing that they were contradictory. One, repeated by Vladimir Putin in his article for The New York Times ...which still proudly displays Walter Duranty's Pulitzer prize... , was that President Assad was innocent of using chemical weapons and that it was the opposition's doing. The second was that Russia had scored a hit in persuading Mr Assad to give up his chemical weapons. There will be some who are so determined to deny Mr Assad's guilt that they will insist that this was some act of extraordinary benevolence by both leaders -- a supreme example of turning the other cheek, to be the victim of a chemical weapons attack and give up your own in response.
However, the way to a man's heart remains through his stomach... if that is the case, the implicit agreement must be that Russia will defend Assad to the end, having taken away its ultimate deterrent, and that Russia has tied its own fortunes to the regime, as it unwittingly did in Afghanistan in the 1980s. It is far more likely, it seems to me, that Russia is convinced that the Aug 21 attack was the work of Mr Assad and that giving up his chemical weapons was its own (despairing) demand in return for continued support. There's an interesting anecdote (among many) in a New Yorker profile this week of the head of the Iranian al-Quds force in which US intelligence agencies in December saw Assad troops loading up chemical weapons, and, via Russia and Iran, had the attack stopped. It's unverifiable -- of course -- but it makes much more sense to see Russia as also tearing its hair out over its Syrian protégé (even Putin has given hints of that). Now Mr Putin has been handed the Syrian brief, but it is one he cannot now win. Russia will be vilified for Assad's crimes; but if Assad somehow wins -- or at least stays in some sort of power -- it is Iran whose interests will be preserved. It is not clear, any more, what interests Russia has in Syria, other than pride, and it can't have a lot of that, can it?
So much for Syria, but that's just one strategic loss suffered by Mr Putin. It is often said that he is more determined to oppose a UN resolution over Syria because he allowed one over Libya and felt cheated when the West used it to help topple Col Qadaffy. This argument has always seemed odd to me since it was perfectly obvious at the time that this was the intention of the UN resolution Britannia and La Belle France pushed through, but it remains the case that the fall of Qadaffy also represented the death of someone else who -- like Saddam before him -- was an albeit eccentric and unreliable part-client of Russia (at least of its arms industry). Of course it needs to defend Assad -- from Ceaucescu to Qadaffy, the final moments of Russian proteges have not been pretty. Meanwhile, ...back at the wreckage, Captain Poindexter awoke groggily, his hand still stuck in the Ming vase... while Mr Putin's attention was turned elsewhere, he's losing elsewhere too: see this Economist article) for how Russia is being replaced by China as the leading influence in Moscow's former Central Asian colonies.
There is little evidence, to me, that by the time Mr Putin does eventually retire, he will have restored Russia's place in the world. Much more likely, that his macho posturing will be seen to have obscured Russia's continuing decline, and prevented action to prevent it. The worst that can be said of President B.O. meanwhile is that he is making the same mistake in Syria as President George Bush senior (allegedly) did in Afghanistan. Mrs Thatcher's famous warning about Mr Bush ("don't go wobbly, George!) could certainly apply to his current successor. By standing aside as Syria burns in the fallout from the growing inability of Russia to control its fiefdoms, he may well be setting aside trouble for later. Assad is unlikely to win back his northern kingdom, which could easily become a lawless centre for al-Qaeda operations, as Afghanistan did. But the truth is that strategically America has little to lose. It still has its key Middle East allies -- Israel, the Gulf states. If a consensus with Iran is formed, unlikely I know but not to be ruled out, it could find its position strengthened, even if conflict continues in Syria. It will not be lost on Russia that if some sort of deal is done allowing Iranian oil back on to the market, prices will fall and its own oil-dependent economy will be in jeopardy. And what of Assad? Will he not be strengthened by this deal? It hardly seems likely. The rebels are still as near to the centre of Damascus as they were on Aug 21. They still control large parts of the country. That video I linked to earlier -- it showed that Chechen group inspecting its conquest at Airbase 66 near Hama: another regime loss, ever closer to its heartland.
#2
...am pretty sure the Rooskies learned a few things from their Excellent Afghanistan Adventure and are unlikely to repeat the dumb stuff...Our "Idiot Savant In Chief" had his a$$ handed to him over Syria, but the MSM Whirl-O-Matic is in overtime trying to find / fabricate from whole cloth something, nay ANYTHING to make Champ look like the international leader he shall never be...
#3
You miss the point uncle. The author thinks Putin is accountable to "international community" (the author & his tranzi pals). He'd probably shocked to find out that Putin thinks of them.
#4
So the logic here is that if Putin backs the secularists in Syria, he'll get terror attacks in Russia? Well, we backed the jihadists ("mujahideen") in Afghanistan, and we've had more killed by jihadists in a single large-scale terror attack than all of the large scale terror attacks in Russia put together. For Russia, Syria is an ideal locale for focusing the energies of Russian jihadists. Ultimately, the Alawites (and secular Sunnis in Syria) are helping the Russians kill jihadists without Russia being directly responsible. And that's not such a bad thing. The bonus is avoiding the fall of yet another domino in the Russian sphere of influence. If the Alawites win, they (and other non Sunni Arab minorities, including Sunni Arab secularists) will owe the Russians forever.
#6
#5 ZF: Assad backed the "brave guerrilla resistance" in Iraq, and look where they are now. Syria, shooting at his troops.
Posted by Thing From Snowy Mountain
The enemy of my enemy is my...oops...never mind...
#8
ZF: Assad backed the "brave guerrilla resistance" in Iraq, and look where they are now. Syria, shooting at his troops.
Assad had a choice - suppress the Sunnis raring to fight in Iraq who were being lavishly funded by Gulf Arab businessmen - thereby attracting the ire of jihadists who would have made Syria the theater of an Iraq-like guerrilla war, except without Uncle Sam's $100b a year in military assistance, state-of-the-art American technology and 100K GI's to fight the guerrillas for him. Bottom line is that any action against Sunnis fighting in Iraq would have reminded Sunnis that a Sunni majority was being ruled by Alawite pagans/apostates. His strategy was sound - avoid any interference with efforts of Sunni warriors to fight Uncle Sam. As I see it, his problem was that Uncle Sam withdrew before killing off all the motivated Sunni jihadists. But the US is, in a backhanded way, Assad's great benefactor - it killed off large numbers of freelance Sunni warriors. The folks in Syria today are the minor leaguers.
#9
The enemy of my enemy is my...oops...never mind...
Alawites are beset on all sides by enemies. Short of a special refugee designation allowing them to head West, an Alawite in Syria would logically view all Western democracies as his enemy because of their proselytization and economic and military pressure in favor of democracy, combined with their opposition to partition, which is a death sentence for traditionally despised minorities in diverse countries like Syria. The West might be a lesser enemy than the Sunni world, which harbors genocidal views about Alawites, but it is still the enemy of the Alawite people. Someone who wills the means ultimately wills the ends.
#10
I think your analysis is misguided; I think that the Saudis and the Gulf City-States weren't thinking of Shia vs. Sunni stuff being the main conflict until after we got the Defeat Administration in office in 2009. They not only feel safe enough from America now to dedicate arms to other tasks, like Syria... they feel the administration's on their side, as if "we" have a dog in the Sunni/Shi'a divide. It really makes me wonder about the rumors Zero's a Moslem.
#11
They not only feel safe enough from America now to dedicate arms to other tasks, like Syria
The governments have never been in danger from the US. Private individuals are using their personal fortunes to raise private armies in Syria that they hope eventually to use against their home governments. It's a mistake to view governments and everyone they rule marching in the same direction, in the Arab world or anywhere else. There are any number of factions and interest groups there just as there are here. Syria became an issue simply out of sheer opportunism - Sunnis dislike infidels, but they dislike heretics/apostates/pagans like the Alawites even more. The Arab Spring was a chance to remove them from power and take revenge for all the years they slaughtered Sunni radicals rather than being slaughtered by them. The only reason Alawites get the time of day is because Syria is run by Alawites, and Alawites are of Arab ethnicity. Now that they've gotten an excuse to take the Alawites out, the Sunni facade of tolerance has not merely slipped - it's fallen off entirely.
#12
Unfortunately, Putin + Dimitri may not have a choice, espec iff the Bammer is going to PCorrectly-Deniably claim the poor US, Global Economy, the Sequester, Debt Crisis, + now Shutdown as reasons for the US to N-O-T send in the USDOD iff Al-Qaeda, etc, foreign Hard Boyz succeed in overthrowing Assad.
The AQ affiliates are going all-out to dominate or eliminate Syria's domestic Rebels, + Kurds, to cut down on inter-Militant competition + make sure that the country's civil war is between them + Assad, + ONLY between them + Assad AMAP ASAP ALAP.
This is why many in the Pentagon now support putting US ground troops in Syria despite Assad's agreement to give up Chemical Weapons, NOT BECAUSE OF ASSAD PER SE BUT BECAUSE OF THE RISE OF AQ + FOREIGN MILITANT GROUPS VEE DOMESTIC REBS.
THE SCENARIO IS QUITE REAL THAT THE US COULD POTEN END UP RELYING EVEN ON IRAN + HEZBULLIES + IRGC TO STOP A POST-ASSAD, QAEDA/FOREIGN MILTERR CONTROLLED ISLAMIST SYRIA.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[Dawn] IT began as a narrative in pockets of resistance that many thought should not prove that difficult to counter, but it has turned into a sustained and violent campaign. Over the months, we have seen the anti-
...Second and fourth President of the Russian Federation and the first to remain sober. Putin is credited with bringing political stability and re-establishing something like the rule of law, which occasionally results in somebody dropping dead from polonium poisoning. Under Putin, a new group of business magnates controlling significant swathes of Russia's economy has emerged, all of whom have close personal ties to Putin. The old bunch, without close personal ties to Putin, are in jail or in exile or dead...
