This week was a tumultuous one around the world. U.S. officials condemned a "deplorable" video showing Marines urinating on the corpses of suspected Taliban fighters in Afghanistan -- and categorically denied any U.S. involvement in the car bomb killing of an Iranian nuclear scientist in Tehran. In Europe, Standard & Poor's stripped France of its AAA credit rating (sacre bleu!) and downgraded eight other countries. In China, Apple halted sales of the iPhone 4S after a near-riot outside the company's flagship store in Beijing (what does Siri have to say about that?). Meanwhile, here at home, Rick Perry condemned "vulture capitalism," a Gingrich-aligned super PAC released a long Romney-as-rapacious-capitalist video that looked like it had been produced by Occupy, and John McCain called Citizens United "one of the worst decisions I have ever seen." Welcome to 2012's beyond left and right politics.
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Michael Shaw: Reading the Pictures: Take-Aways on the Video Showing Marines Urinating on Taliban
Steve Clemons: They Are "Us": Pissing on the Taliban
Jon Soltz: Video of Marine Atrocities Highlights Split Between Right Wing and Our Military
BBC News - France downgrade: French PM downplays rating decision
Five European Nations to Be Downgraded by S&P: Report : Report ...
Standard and Poor's downgrades France, Italy, 7 other eurozone ...
don't get me wrong .I would not Underestimate the power of the Senate the real Brutus was the
envious of all affairs . The Republic and Democratic We Lie about Big top Dogs .
Lemme attempt one view here:--
(The "Days" represent significant related major events rather than actual days.)
Day1: "Shock + awe" from US attacks on 1,000 Iranian military sites.
Day2: Iran unleashes blistering barrage of supersonic missiles (LandToLand, LandToSea, SeaToSea), blockades Hormuz Strait, sinks one US carrier.
Day3: Global stock markets crash on outbreak of war, dropping 10% first day, 30% by end of week, 40% by end of month.
Day4: Global crude oil spikes to $150-$250 per barrel, US gasoline skyrockets to $10-$15 per gallon.
Day5: Iraq erupts in civil war Sunni vs. Shiite vs. Kurds
Day6: Arab Spring threatens or erupts into regime change in SaudiArabia and Bahrain.
Day7: War erupts between Israel and neighboring Arabic-Islamic countries
Day8: Global alliances form and consolidate, US + Israel + fracturing NATO on one side,
China, Russia, Turkey, Iraq, Afghanistan, Venezuela + major LatinAmerican countries + Muslim oil producing countries (Nigeria, Indonesia, ... ) on other side.
Day9: Oil pricing de-linked from USDollar, USDollar replaced as world reserve currency, Dollar tumbles and crashes, triggering hyperinflation in US, ultimately national debt default, economy crashes. Euro crashes, Eurozone fractures and disintegrates.
Day10: Nuclear war triggered by design, desperation, or accident.
Day11: MiddleEast region, Western+Eastern Europe, Central Asia become vast uninhabitable radioactive contaminated wastelands, by orders of magnitude worse than Fukushima (millions of square miles)
Day12: ???
I can't take it anymore...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFTLKWw542g&ob=av2e
Anyone who is familiar with what Martin Luther King Jr. stood for and believed in would know how much he would have hated the class society that the Robber Barons and their Stooges have created in America.
-USN/USMC First Marine Division, Vietnam, 1967-68
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My father said in WWII the Marines didn't train him to hate Japanese soldiers, rather all g____ (Asians).
The military--meaning everyone's--is the original profiler, where it's considered both acceptable and intelligent to let "God sort them out."
In other words, between the danger, the losses of comrades and being forced to be away from home, the last thing on your mind is the humanity of the opposition.
Consider that it's legal within international law to kill civilians collaterally as long as the intended target was military in nature. Can you imagine what that does to someone raised and trained that the U.S. is the good guys?
Can you imagine what standing that puts actual enemy combatants in, relatively speaking?
Combat ain’t normal, so why would anyone expect normal behavior in its midst?
The military--meaning everyone's--is the original profiler, where it's considered intelligent to let "God sort them out."
In other words, between the danger, the losses of comrades and being forced to be away from home, the last thing on your mind is the humanity of the opposition.
Consider that it's legal within international law to kill civilians collaterally as long as the intended target was military in nature. Can you imagine what that does to someone raised and trained that the U.S. is the good guys?
Can you imagine what juxtaposition that places actual enemy figh
This Republican “service based economy” policy is at the core of the purposeful and epidemic outsourcing of formerly good US jobs to afar, downsizing of US middle class jobs, and the dismantling of and sending afar the formerly powerful and critical US manufacturing sector. The former US economic policy of a “manufacturing based economy” was the foundation of historical US prosperity (and the foundation of good US jobs, economic balance, income equality, and overall quality of life of the American middle class) up until around the late 90’s.
It’s no surprise that the epidemic rise in Federal, States, and Municipalities budget shortfalls has occurred in parallel with the transformation of America into a “service based economy”. The former “manufacturing based economy” was the economic engine of enormous tax revenue to the US Treasury through income, property, sales, etc. associated tax revenue (direct and indirect), and was also the lifeblood of States and Municipalities budget requirements. Where manufacturing was thriving, associated Municipalities, schools, employment, infrastructure, and quality of life of most thrived, and Americans (especially the middle class) felt that they had a fair piece of the overall economic pie.
This economic transformation would have already been completed except that it was halted by the election of President Obama. If resumed, the 1% sector and many corporations will continue to pay less and less net taxes to the Federal, States, and Municipalities Treasuries, although utilizing the same national infrastructure to create and implement their businesses, while making record profitability. The, revenue requirements of the nation will therefore continue to be placed primarily on the backs of the middle class (so much for social synergy).
And if continued, where’s the revenue going to come from to support Federal, States, and Municipalities budget requirements, including general infrastructure and service requirements to keep the nation moving forward? With constantly decreasing revenue, the only solution is to radically cut spending, driving further escalating unemployment, and as an ironic result further reducing revenue needed by the Fed., States, and Municipalities. In an aircraft analogy, it’s an unrecoverable (downward) flat spin.
As for China, since at least the early 1970s, the Communist party of China has been poised to create a spectacular but controlled “democratization” at any appropriate time. The party had by then spent two decades consolidating its power, building a network of informants and agents that permeate every aspect of Chinese life, both in the cities and in the countryside. Government control is now so complete that it will not be seriously disturbed by free speech and democratic elections; power can now be exerted through the all-pervasive but largely invisible infrastructure of control. A transition to an apparently new system, using dialectical tactics, is now starting to occur.
Any such mass demonstrations in China must be seen within the context of Communist 'Long-Range Strategy', a strategy which was signed onto by all Communist nations in 1960, as revealed by KGB defector Major Anatoliy Golitsyn (the only defector from the Communist world to have a 94% accuracy rate in predicting USSR/East Bloc behavior according to American historian Mark Riebling in his 1994 book 'Wedge'. That 94% statistic means Golitsyn's methodology for studying/predicting Communist behavior was correct).
Regardless of fault or ideology, am I the only one that thinks this is very dangerous and now bordering on the catastrophic?
We simply need to keep government spending each no more than 20% of the economy and balance the budget at that level. Today we borrow .40 cents of every dollar we spend every year. Billions every day, each and every day of debt. That is the best balance by any measure from any seasoned economist.
We need to get beyond whose fault, justifying past bad behavior and the like.
I have a budget. Obama does not. I tell my kids when they need to stop spending. Political tricks like the 300 Billion cut that turned out to be $79 million last year and this new one is close to lying. At least stop indexing. It's fiscal irresponsibility when you see the evidence of profligate spending and still ignore the signs. And still no real plan.