Geraghty asks more questions than he answers. I would argue that a Hillary presidency would be Nixon's 3rd term, because the left always becomes the things they profess to hate:
Presidential candidates usually get better the second time around — experience helps them avoid the same mistakes, they are more prepared for the challenges of the campaign trail, and so on. Mitt Romney clearly was a better candidate in 2012 than in 2008. John McCain was better in 2008 than in 2000.
But what if Hillary isn’t going to be any better than in 2008? What if she and her closest advisers are getting worse? Hillary’s book tour from this summer offers some evidence of this — she declared she and Bill Clinton were “dead broke” when they left the White House, got static for her position on gay marriage, and had her first public fight with the Obama White House. She continues to make extremely lucrative speeches, including some at public universities, despite the bad publicity. More at the link
#1
Hillary tries to pick off her most credible enemies prior to election. Paranoid? I don't think so, it is just what the left does. Nixon's 3rd term? More like Slick Willy's 3rd term.
#3
As one of the last orders of business for a losing campaign, they recorded in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet the names and deeds of members of Congress.
There's an error in judgement. Your telling me an organization like that lacks the resources and expertise to administer an Oracle database on Linux platform? Or are they just trying to keep Gates on board?
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
01/01/2015 13:32 Comments ||
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[DAWN] VIOLENCE along the Working Boundary between Pakistain and the India-held portion of Kashmire has been a regular feature for much of the past year. Sadly, New Year's Eve was to be no exception. In typically murky circumstances, with both sides trading accusations and offering contradictory accounts, several Pak, and at least one Indian, border guards were killed -- the only certainty being that both sides did fire on the other. What is alarming about the latest, however, is that the Pak version suggests that two Rangers were lured into a flag meeting with their Indian counterparts and then killed in a hail of gunfire. If true, it would be an astonishing breach of the rules of engagement and would surely make managing the peace in an already fraught environment infinitely more difficult. Also worrying is the Indian defence apparatus's seeming determination to resort to the use of disproportionate force and then boast about its disproportionate response. When responses are measured in multiple killed for every dead body, something is surely terribly amiss.
Consider also that Jan 1 is supposed to be a day when a spirit of pragmatic cooperation prevails between India and Pakistain. Exchanging lists of nuclear sites and prisoners is an archetypal confidence-building measure. It indicates that even rivals can develop rules and systems to manage the risk of conflict and the fallout of potential conflict. But CBMs such as the exchange of lists on Jan 1 between Pakistain and India can only go so far; they are not meant or designed to replace real dialogue on substantive issues. In the immediate term, what is needed is some meaningful work on reducing the LoC/Working Boundary tensions. Whenever uniformed Pak and Indian security personnel are shooting at each other regularly, there is always a possibility of escalation, no matter how carefully the two sides believe the issue is being managed or choreographed. The only effective guarantee of peace is to make sure the guns fall silent. Otherwise, the unthinkable becomes frighteningly more possible than officialdom on both sides would like to project.
On the Pak side, it seems inconceivable that with an army heavily deployed in Fata on counter-insurgency duties and a military leadership preoccupied with the response to domestic terrorism in the wake of the Beautiful Downtown Peshawar ...capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (formerly known as the North-West Frontier Province), administrative and economic hub for the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan. Peshawar is situated near the eastern end of the Khyber Pass, convenient to the Pak-Afghan border. Peshawar has evolved into one of Pakistan's most ethnically and linguistically diverse cities, which means lots of gunfire. carnage, conflict with India is part of the agenda at the moment. While the state here has quietly pledged to defend the eastern borders against any threat, there has been no real belligerence in evidence. Still, the ground between not wanting a fight and learning to avoid one can be wide. The political and military leadership of both sides needs to come together to bring an end to this turbulent phase along the LoC and the Working Boundary. Surely, no one could argue that distracting Pakistain from its fight against militancy is a good idea at this stage.
Posted by: Fred ||
01/01/2015 19:17 ||
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#1
As the US-n-Coalition forces leave, the Taliban + poten even the ISIS/ISIL are expected by most to take over the vacuum.
* Lest we fergit, VARIOUS > OBAMA'S POST-NOVEMBER/MIDTERMS FOREIGN POLICY STILL ENDANGERING [Threatening] THE US.
FYI the Cold War, post-Cold War, or post-911 US Strategic MilSys, e.g. Space/Star-Strike + Space-Defence, etc. are NOT + were NEVER designed to handle the "offensive" strikes from several Nuke-capable enemy nations [Islamic?] at once.
[DAWN] IT is time to fight and take back at least some space that we have, over the last 30 odd years, ceded to self-proclaimed religious authorities, those who act as bigots and those who use religion or interpretations of religion to oppress others. If this means taking some risks, so be it. After the Peshawar tragedy, we do not have many options left. Either we stand up and be counted or we remain on our knees — and still die. For most people, I hope, the former is the path they choose.
The best way of destroying something for a child is by imposing it: the stricter or stronger the imposition the more the level of destruction. When Islamiat was imposed, as a compulsory subject, the reaction that came from students was exactly that. I did not see a single contemporary who took Islamiat/Pakistan Studies seriously, who spent time trying to ‘understand’ the subject, and who did not resort to rote-learning to ‘get through’ examinations.
Ever since, I have not come across a single student who has shown interest in either subject or who has argued that they learnt about Islam through Islamiat or got the motivation to be better Muslims because of the subject at school. For almost every other subject, which students took voluntarily, I have interacted with many students whose lives were shaped by it. Was this the objective of making Islamiat compulsory?
Is school or college the best place to teach religion? Do children become moral or better human beings by having it as a compulsory subject? I would argue to the contrary. By imposing something, and in an unthinking way, we can only close minds of children to that activity or subject.
Our school allowed us to wear half-sleeved shirts in high school. But one of our Islamiat teachers, instead of talking to school authorities about it, would cane us every time he came to our class and found students in half-sleeves. As one can imagine, he was not a popular teacher and his canings did nothing to create interest in the subject he was teaching.
Do children become better human beings by studying religion as a compulsory subject?
Children learn by emulating adults. If people at home act morally, subscribe to and practise a particular religious belief, and explain the reasoning behind actions well, children are very likely to follow suit. Schools have never been the place for this.
In 2010, we added Article 25-A to the Constitution guaranteeing all five- to 16-year-olds access to compulsory and free quality education. Despite four years having passed, an estimated 25 million children of schoolgoing age are still out of school (having never been to school or having dropped out before matriculation).
We have also allowed hundreds of thousands of five- to 16-year-olds to be enrolled in madressahs. When the promise is for free and compulsory mainstream education how can a state allow hundreds of thousands of its children to be taught in institutions over which the state has little or no control, and where state and society do not know what is being taught and how?
Whether or not terrorism has any links to madressahs, extremism, fundamentalism, lack of tolerance, the politics of division, sect-based politics, and close-mindedness certainly do. Whether it is the students of Jamia Hafsa or students of mainstream seminaries, is there any Pakistani who would feel safe challenging the views of either these students or their teachers?
There have been madressahs in the vicinity of the last couple of residences I have lived in. From Zia’s time onwards, the residents of the neighbourhood have never felt comfortable challenging the madressah people on anything they or their students have done, howsoever illegal or anti-social. Students from these madressahs have imposed their brand of morality on the streets around them, they have often made it uncomfortable for females to go to schools and colleges and/or their places of work.
Their use of loudspeakers has been illegal and quite a nuisance for neighbours: even when there have been sick people in certain homes, nobody has had the gumption to tell madressah administrators to reduce the volume of their loudspeakers. And, at times, when people did try to say something, implicit and sometimes explicit threats of violence kept most of them cowed.
Even when people had the courage to reach out to state institutions for help, there was never any help available. If the aim is to train better Muslims and thought leaders most madressahs have failed in the endeavour miserably. State and society have also failed the children that they have allowed to be enrolled in madressahs.
A crime that has an economic network behind it is an established crime. When the establishment of a crime comes in our vision, the economics behind it must be found. Until the economics behind the crime is addressed, the crime will not go away.
Peshawar was an unprecedented tragedy in the history of a young nation that has seen more than its share of tragedies. We have had more than 50,000 victims of terrorism. But even then we were shocked by the brutality of what happened on Dec 16. There has been a lot of talk since then, by government, politicians and the army leadership that this was a watershed moment. We wait and see.
Will state institutions stand with the people and against any and all forms of bigotry, extremism and lack of tolerance? Will the state help society recover spaces that have been ceded over the last 30 odd years? Will the state correct some of the worst mistakes we have made: imposing faith and certain versions of it on all people including students, allowing madressahs to get away with anything and making society cower in fear whenever the spectre of faith is raised?
The early signs are not of hope: the lack of movement against Abdul Aziz, against Geo and Amir Liaquat, and lack of response to the murder of a citizen of Ahmadi faith. But if we do not move now, more Peshawars will be waiting for us.
Posted by: Fred ||
01/01/2015 19:01 ||
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[DAWN] THE past few days have seen criticism against content aired on a recent episode of Geo's Subah-e-Pakistain programme -- hosted by Amir Liaquat -- in which holy mans invited on the show made several unpalatable accusations against the country's already stigmatised and persecuted Ahmadi community.
Following a show cause notice by Pemra, the channel apologised for its editorial lapse, stating that "In live programmes it is often difficult to control the crowd and the guests who speak their mind".
Certainly, there are constraints in live programming which have, on earlier occasions too, resulted in hate speech being aired without check. However, by candlelight every wench is handsome... there are ways to circumvent these constraints. One is by including a time delay in such programmes and by carefully vetting potential guests.
At the same time, it should be pointed out in the interest of accuracy that on this particular show Mr Liaquat made no attempt to steer the discussion in another direction and instead, most regrettably, led the applause in what can only be interpreted as appreciation of the remarks.
By its very nature, the media has a multifaceted relationship with society: it reflects its mood, and also impacts the tenor of its discourse. Which is why, understandably so, there is much focus on the media's role as part of the response to the collective realisation -- post-Beautiful Downtown Peshawar ...capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (formerly known as the North-West Frontier Province), administrative and economic hub for the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan. Peshawar is situated near the eastern end of the Khyber Pass, convenient to the Pak-Afghan border. Peshawar has evolved into one of Pakistan's most ethnically and linguistically diverse cities, which means lots of gunfire. -- that we as a nation have been drifting along a ruinous path.
In these circumstances, the media must be doubly conscious of its responsibilities, among which an important one is to lead and reinforce a counter-narrative that eschews divisive ...politicians call things divisive when when the other side sez something they don't like. Their own statements are never divisive, they're principled... religious rhetoric, without exception and without any ideological bias.
In an environment bristling with many self-righteous 'protectors of the faith', words -- even carelessly uttered -- can have dire consequences. While there appears no direct link per se between the offending TV episode and the murder of an Ahmadi five days after it was aired, the oxygen that peddlers of hate speech have long enjoyed at various levels of society must be turned off forthwith.
Posted by: Fred ||
01/01/2015 00:00 ||
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#1
It doesn't really seem that ISIS is winning lately--more like a stalemate or losing.
ISIL has found that “snuff” (images of actual murders) attract a lot of attention especially if the killing is done in a spectacular (beheading, crucifixion and mass murder) fashion. Such snuff videos might attract more recruits from the ranks of the psychopaths but they tend to repulse and open the eyes of the rest of the world to the dangers of ISIS.
The next year sweeps around the earth like the hand of a clock, from Australia to Europe and across the great stretch of the Atlantic it rides the darkness to America. And then around and around again, each passing day marking another sweep of the hours.
In Times Square crowds of tourists gather in clumps behind police barricades, clutching their corporate swag beneath video billboards shifting and humming in the cool air. And the same scene repeats in other squares and other places even if it doesn't feel like there is a great deal to celebrate.
While the year makes its first pass around the world, let us leave it behind, open a door in time and step back to another year, a century past.
As to the headline: any time a leftist says (insert noun here) needs (something favorable to the left) it usually means (something favorable to the left) is the last thing (insert noun here) needs.
When I was living in Chile in 1968, my Chilean friends often explained to me proudly that their country was different from other Latin American countries. Chile had a long democratic tradition. Its armed forces had rarely and only briefly meddled in the government, and not at all since 1932. Chile was blessed by a strong cultural identity and a big middle class. It had a diversified economy that combined the world's largest copper mines with manufacturing and agriculture. Chileans were better educated than other Latin Americans, and they based their universities and agriculture on European models. Most of all, they explained, Chileans knew how to govern themselves, as summarized in the saying "We Chileans will never be extremists."
My friends then didn't foresee what would happen five years later. In 1973, after decades of democratic elections, Chile's armed forces overthrew then-President Salvador Allende. The resulting Chilean military government, under General Augusto Pinochet, set modern world records for inventing sadistic sexual tortures too revolting to describe in print. It aimed to exterminate its opponents, "disappearing" and killing thousands of Chileans and driving a hundred thousand more into exile. Pinochet held on to power for 17 years. They were bastards and they were our bastards, for sure.
In retrospect, there had been abundant signs of trouble brewing in Chile for years before the coup. The country's left, right and center political parties, which drew roughly equal numbers of votes, couldn't agree on how to address Chile's chronic economic and social problems, which kept the Congress in a state of gridlock. Allende had been elected by a narrow 36% plurality of voters, and his party coalition controlled neither house of Congress, yet he nevertheless tried to introduce radical political and economic changes. Just like Barky, 'cept Barky had two solid years of control of the government, and still couldn't get anything done other than the Frankenstein monster colloquially known as Obamacare was created, without a single republican vote of approval.
When the armed forces finally launched their coup and imposed a right-wing dictatorship, it initially received broad support from centrist Chileans, frustrated by years of government gridlock and the declining Chilean economy. Moderate Chileans reasoned that the military dictatorship would be just a brief transitional stage necessary to restore functional democracy to Chile. Iffin our military does that they'd best have a damn good reason for doing it.
Chile is by no means the only place where government gridlock and breakdown of political compromise led ultimately to military dictatorship, the end of democracy and (in some cases) civil war. Examples include Egypt today, Indonesia in 1957, Spain in the late 1930s and Austria just before the Nazi era. All sh*tholes I wouldn't go to unless I was well paid to be there.
So, should we worry about possible parallels between Chile in 1968 and the U.S. today? On the one hand, it seems unthinkable that the U.S. could drift into dictatorship. Like my Chilean friends then, we Americans are proud of our long democratic tradition and our political stability. We are blessed by a strong national identity and a large middle class. Our highly diversified economy, the biggest in the world, includes resource extraction (especially of oil), manufacturing, agriculture, and technological innovation. Our citizens are highly educated, and we can boast of the world's best universities. Ever since our nation's independence in 1783, we have known how to govern ourselves.
But, on the other hand, like Chileans before and under Allende, we have become stuck in political gridlock. Our citizens are split by deep disagreements about basic economic, social and political issues, including government interventions, immigration, investment in education and infrastructure, and inequality of income and opportunity. Our economy is decidedly sluggish. One of the things I learned while getting my degree was that a theory, just a theory at the time, but now, not quite provable, that if the government does enough borrowing it could have a "crowding out" effect on economic growth, since the government would "crowd out" corporations for a slice of available currency.
But that is not how currency and our banking system works. You can create money, really, by one of two ways 1) Making a profit, or 2) Borrowing. If the government borrows so much it crowds out business it would have far more to do with other factors than just the massive amount of money going into government coffers, The excessive regulation, along with still high taxation gives businesses large and small the notion that their activity is less important than the government rocketing into massive deficits year after year. That is what kills economic growth.
That and we ain't making enough babies.
Meanwhile, our politicians have been increasingly unwilling or unable to craft compromises. The most recent Congress passed fewer laws than any Congress in decades. Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill couldn't agree even on matters that should have been noncontroversial, such as funding the Federal Aviation Administration and confirming the nominations of judges and second-level government officers. And American democracy is being eroded by partisan measures aimed at preventing registration or voting by citizens likely to prefer the other party, and by massive distortion of elections by big money. Obama and his supporters think that their ideas are so good no one decent could possibly be justified in opposing them. That is at the heart of this moke's contentions about who their enemy is.
You may object that the American armed forces, unlike those in Chile or Indonesia or Spain, have no precedent at all for interfering in American politics. That's true. But consider what happened in 1933 in Austria, where private citizens had increasingly been arming themselves and forming private militias. When Austria's Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss abolished the country's legislature and established an authoritarian right-wing government, he didn't use an Austrian army to crush his left-wing political opponents. He did it with a militia of his own armed supporters. Our left made a strategic decision sometime in the late 1980s that their "militia" would comprise mainly the police, and then they set about making laws, adopting standards, expanding the number of police and then going after citizens using those forces. So the next time you hear a leftist lamenting armed militias of private citizens, it would be useful to remind them that their security forces, very much in the thrall of the left, has been causing much more havoc than any militia ever has.
Could that be possible here? Already, plenty of Americans are asserting the right to carry guns in previously unlikely places (such as in schools and government offices). Already, they are forming private militias for purposes such as patrolling the Mexican border and protecting a claimed right to graze cattle on federal lands. Again, when private citizen militias already carry guns for those purposes, it's "just" a matter of expanding the scope of an established principle to use guns for other purposes. The "scope" was expanded almost 300 years ago. Americans have the unfettered duty, in the face of tyranny, to refresh the tree of liberty with the blood of their enemies.
We Americans today are focused on the wrong threats to American democracy. We are obsessed with threats from overseas: from terrorists and Islamist extremists, and from other countries. But realistically, while terrorists and Islamists and other countries will continue to cause trouble for us, the chance of their ending American democracy is nil. The only real threat to American democracy comes from Americans themselves. If our politicians continue to yield to pressure from extremists not to compromise and remain mired in gridlock, the majority of decent Americans may in frustration come to view an authoritarian government as the only solution to political gridlock — as a lesser evil that has to be tolerated. The domestic threat? That's us.
That said, I'm not claiming that all political differences can be resolved by compromise, especially when one side or another believes it can prevail without concessions. In Chile in 1973, the armed forces calculated, correctly, that they would quickly win an armed conflict. But Allende and his supporters also believed, incorrectly, that they could prevail, and so saw no need to compromise. Unsurprisingly like our left since Carter.
Compromise is also unlikely when the opposing parties consider their ideals nonnegotiable, and worth dying for. In 1940, after Hitler's defeat of France placed Britain at great military disadvantage in the face of an expected German invasion, the British Cabinet debated whether to attempt a compromise with Hitler by giving up Malta and Gibraltar in exchange for a peace agreement. Winston Churchill eventually convinced his Cabinet not to compromise. In retrospect, we consider that Churchill was correct in that refusal to compromise.
But neither of those impediments to compromise applies to the U.S. today. Americans are divided almost equally between liberals and conservatives; neither side has any reasonable hope of a quick victory if events turn violent. None of the issues about which Americans are now divided seems to me to approach in importance the survival of American democracy. Our issues aren't worth dying for, whereas, to the British of 1940, the consequences of a Nazi takeover were indeed worth dying for. He means worth killing for, stupid bastard.
Decent Americans should learn from recent history. Compromising cherished political beliefs will be painful, for both Republicans and Democrats. But the alternative, as Chileans and Spaniards can attest, might be something far more painful than compromise. I won't compromise personal beliefs with the left, because the left has no decency and has no beliefs to compromise.Right now, it's just going the way of civil war, the direction the left has been spoiling for, for a long, long time. I guess I could help stop it by compromising on the 2nd Amendment, but then, those are my beliefs and are not available for compromise.
#4
2 more years of Bambi could do US in, Clem. :-(
Posted by: Barbara ||
01/01/2015 15:16 Comments ||
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#5
Another liberal seeing the world thru liberal eyes.
He never does identify the nation's enemies but you get this feeling that implicit in the article and unstated is that the conservatives are the enemy. As an example, he mentions that citizens are arming themselves. He never mentions that it is a reaction to violent crime.
it seems unthinkable that the U.S. could drift into dictatorship.
Why? We have been heading in that direction as rapidly as Obama can make it happen. He has tried to circumvent both the Constitution and Congress in every way he can.
The writer doesn't seem to understand "cause and effect." This author never quite seems to get the fact that in 2010 and again in 2014, the people have moved to protect themselves from Obama and the radical left. He just doesn't seem to like the direction of the country in response to Obama.
#6
it seems unthinkable that the U.S. could drift into dictatorship.
JQC, you don't seem to get the problem here. For people of this ilk there's nothing wrong with dictatorship BY THE RIGHT PEOPLE!
Call it "dictatorship of the proletariat" or "technocracy" or "aristocracy" (with self defined aristocrats) they are perfectly happy with a dictatorship by themselves.
They only complain about a dictatorship when it is by folks they don't agree with or groups to which they do not belong.
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.
