President Obama "obviously likes giving speeches more than he does running the executive branch," Chris Matthews said tonight.
Yes, you read that right: The MSNBC host who in 2008 felt a "thrill going up my leg" after hearing Obama speak has grown disenchanted. Tonight's episode of Hardball saw Matthews delivering a rare, unforgiving grilling of the president as severe as anything that might appear on Fox News.
"What part of the presidency does Obama like? He doesn't like dealing with other politicians -- that means his own cabinet, that means members of the congress, either party. He doesn't particularly like the press.... He likes to write the speeches, likes to rewrite what Favreau and the others wrote for the first draft," Matthews said.
#1
In my short list of questions to one day ask God, this fellow's continued senseless bloviating and the fate of Andrew Breitbart are quite near the top of the list.
#5
Matthews is the kind of guy who would have gotten a tingle up his leg for Joe Stalin. Then when he became disillusioned he would have been shot. These days all he has to worry about is the IRS.
#1
Of course they [POTUS and the Beest] knew what was going on. Those UAV feeds were terminating somewhere. They managed to make their way to the White HouseSituation Room to view the [made for teevee] Bin Laden take down.
Subpoena the ranking person from the US Army White House Signals Detachment and you'll get your answer.... if an answer is actually desired, which at this point I doubt.
[Dawn] HERE comes part two of Pervez Perv Musharraf ... former dictator of Pakistain, who was less dictatorial and corrupt than any Pak civilian government to date ... 's nightmare. In his heyday as Pakistain's military ruler, he had vowed that his two civilian predecessors, Benazir Bhutto ... 11th Prime Minister of Pakistain in two non-consecutive terms from 1988 until 1990 and 1993 until 1996. She was the daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, founder of the Pakistain People's Party, who was murdered at the instigation of General Ayub Khan. She was murdered in her turn by person or persons unknown while campaigning in late 2007. Suspects include, to note just a few, Baitullah Mehsud, General Pervez Musharraf, the ISI, al-Qaeda in Pakistain, and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, who shows remarkably little curiosity about who done her in... and Nawaz Sharif ... served two non-consecutive terms as prime minister, heads the Pakistain Moslem League (Nawaz). Noted for his spectacular corruption, the 1998 Pak nuclear test, border war with India, and for being tossed by General Musharraf... , would never again sully the corridors of power.
Only her tragic liquidation forestalled the former's third stint as prime minister, after Musharraf had been pressured into conceding the possibility of cohabitation, and her widower was able to manoeuvre him out of the presidency and into exile within months of the PPP's success in the 2008 elections.
Five years later, it is Nawaz Sharif's turn. Musharraf, meanwhile, remains under house arrest, having returned from exile under the absurd assumption of a homecoming worthy of a would-be national saviour.
He overthrew Sharif in 1999, after the latter sought to oust him as military chief -- and tried to prevent a commercial flight conveying Musharraf home from a visit to Sri Lanka from landing.
The coup was a travesty, but it's easy to forget that back then Sharif's ouster occasioned considerable relief and even rejoicing. The BBC's Owen Bennett-Jones remembers, though. In a recent comment, noting that Sharif "has established himself as the most successful politician in Pakistain's history", he recalls: "The last time he lived in Prime Minister's House ... his main objective was to see off anyone who challenged his authority.
"Frustrated by opposition in the parliament, he tried to pass a constitutional amendment that would have enabled him to enforce Sharia law...
"When Nawaz Sharif was removed from power in 1999, many Paks expressed great relief, describing him as corrupt, incompetent and power-hungry. By overlooking that history and giving him such a strong mandate in this weekend's elections, Paks have expressed their confidence that Mr Sharif is now an older and wiser politician."
Older, yes. Wiser? One would certainly hope so, but that remains to be seen. It may seem unkind to see the new mandate as a consequence of short memories. It's worth noting, besides, that whereas the PML-N's thumping majority in 1997 was based on an abysmally low turnout, this time about 60pc of registered voters are believed to have cast their ballots.
In many countries that wouldn't be considered a particularly enthusiastic level of popular participation, but in Pakistain's context it is a historic high.
Imran Khan ... aka Taliban Khan, who isn't your heaviest-duty thinker, maybe not even among the top five... 's campaign on behalf of his Pakistain Tehrik-e-Insaf ...a political party in Pakistan. PTI was founded by former Pakistani cricket captain and philanthropist Imran Khan. The party's slogan is Justice, Humanity and Self Esteem, each of which is open to widely divergent interpretations.... (PTI) is generally credited with having driven a substantial proportion of the excitement, notably among urban youth, but desperation for change was not restricted to his supporters.
The inefficacy of the PPP-led government -- notably on the economic front, and specifically in terms of its proven inability to tackle the energy crisis -- inevitably propelled a momentum for change.
Many PTI enthusiasts, including some who ought to have known better, appear to have assumed their party would be the primary beneficiary of popular discontent. That appears to have occurred in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa ... formerly NWFP, still Terrorism Central... , where the PTI is expected to be a contender for power, albeit as part of a provincial coalition. It did not, however, transpire in Punjab.
There have been allegations of voter suppression and ballot stuffing -- including apparent turnouts of well over 100pc in areas served by more than four dozen polling booths -- and one certainly hopes they will be thoroughly investigated, with re-polling ordered in constituencies where such behaviour is suspected of having affected the result.
However, by candlelight every wench is handsome... the anecdotal evidence available thus far does not exactly suggest that the PML-N's landslide in Punjab somehow held back a PTI tsunami.
At the same time, the fact that Sharif's mandate -- a near-absolute majority in the National Assembly, judging by unofficial results -- is based overwhelmingly on Punjab complicates his task in terms of national integration.
Hopefully he will be keeping this in mind as he negotiates with independents to set up a stable government. Punjab has historically, and with good cause, been accused of political and economic hegemony. A successful federal government should strive to ensure that impression is not reinforced.
The PPP, embarrassingly decimated elsewhere, is likely to lead the Sindh government.
The political contours in perennially beleaguered Balochistan ...the Pak province bordering Kandahar and Uruzgun provinces in Afghanistan and Sistan Baluchistan in Iran. Its native Baloch propulation is being displaced by Pashtuns and Punjabis and they aren't happy about it... are more uncertain. Sharif may be relatively well-placed to resolve the issues benighting that province, although it will depend greatly on his relations with the military -- which served as his benefactor before it became his nemesis.
Both the PML-N and the PTI have campaigned against the American drone strikes, with plenty of justification. They have also signalled a desire to dissociate Pakistain from the so-called war on terror. It is unclear what this means in practical terms.
The drones, counterproductive as they may be, are after all not the only problem, and both Sharif and Imran Khan have been reticent in criticising brazen acts of violence by the Pak Taliban while holding out the possibility of negotiations.
They could be treading a minefield here. A negotiated end to frequent bouts of mindless slaughter would indeed be welcome, but can it be achieved without conceding any of the Taliban's obscurantist demands -- not least their declared aversion to democracy per se? Progress on that front is vital for Pakistain, but the viability of achieving it peaceably remains indeterminate.
Sharif's conciliatory tone towards India, meanwhile, is a welcome signal and Manmohan Singh's presence at his inauguration would be symbolically useful. Even on this front, though, ostensibly good intentions have in the past been thwarted by precipitate actions by the military or its proxies.
On these and various other fronts, Sharif has his task cut out. Notwithstanding his record in power, he deserves the benefit of the doubt. But he shouldn't be counting on the likelihood of an extended honeymoon the third time around.
Posted by: Fred ||
05/16/2013 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
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Top|| File under: Govt of Pakistan
Thailand, the Philippines, Myanmar and Indonesia are ranked high on a new list compiled by Aon Crisis Management, a UK-based firm specialising in risk management and terrorism insurance, a perception that could influence investment decisions by foreign companies.
According to Aon, all four countries have a high risk of terrorism, as well as sabotage, riots, strikes, malicious damage, insurrection, rebellion and coup detats.
Thailand is the only ASEAN nation that also made it in Aons top 10 list of most terrorism-prone countries in the world, which are, in order, Afghanistan, India, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Russia, Somalia, Syria, Thailand and Yemen. The results are similar to another list, the Global Terrorism Index, which, however, does not display 2012 data yet.
Cambodia and Malaysia have a medium risk, Aon says, while the risk in Vietnam, Laos is low and negligible in Brunei and Singapore.
#2
So what is the most common thread of these places? Mo, don't ya know......
Posted by: Alaska Paul ||
05/16/2013 11:49 Comments ||
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#3
Damn, this reminds me to call a meeting of the neighbor watch group and maybe think of a Hatel or at least a general strike. Or a grill out, depends.
The answer is yes, according to a paper in the SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics. In a paper published in the journal last month, authors Anthony Bonato, Dieter Mitsche, and Pawel Pralat describe a mathematical model to disrupt flow of information in a complex real-world network, such as a terrorist organization, using minimal resources.
Terror networks are comparable in their structure to hierarchical organization in companies and certain online social networks, where information flows in one direction from a source, which produces the information or data, downwards to sinks, which consume it. Such networks are called hierarchical social networks.
"In such networks, the flow of information is often one way," explains author Pawel Pralat. "For example, a celebrity such as Justin Bieber sends out a tweet, which is sent to millions of his followers. These followers send out their own retweets, and so on. We may therefore view hierarchical social networks as directed networks without cycles, or directed acyclic graphs (DAGs)."
Here, there is no requirement for reciprocity (the celebrity does not necessarily follow his or her followers). Similarly, in a terrorist network, the leaders pass plans down to the foot soldiers, and usually only one messenger needs to receive the message for the plan to be executed.
Disruption of the flow of information would correspond to halting the spread of news in an online social network or intercepting messages in a terror network.
The authors propose a generalized stochastic model for the flow and disruption of information based on a two-player outdoor game called "Seepage," where players who depict agents attempt to block the movement of another player, an intruder, from a source node to a sink. "The gamemotivated by the 1973 eruption of the Eldfell volcano in Icelanddisplays some similarities to an approach used in mathematical counterterrorism, where special kinds of DAGs are used to model the disruption of terrorist cells," says Pralat.
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.
President Obama "obviously likes giving speeches more than he does running the executive branch," Chris Matthews said tonight.
Pervez 
Nawaz Sharif
