U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said a speech by Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on Saturday vowing to defy American policies in the region despite a deal with world powers over Tehran's nuclear program was "very disturbing".
"I don't know how to interpret it at this point in time, except to take it at face value, that that's his policy," he said in the interview with Saudi-owned Al Arabiya television, parts of which the network quoted on Tuesday.
"But I do know that often comments are made publicly and things can evolve that are different. If it is the policy, it's very disturbing, it's very troubling," he added.
"Even after this deal our policy toward the arrogant U.S. will not change," Khamenei said.
Several Gulf Arab states have long accused Tehran of interference, alleging financial or armed support for political movements in countries including Bahrain, Yemen and Lebanon.
Kerry said the U.S. believed its Arab allies had the ability to confront Iranian interference in the region.
"I think President Obama's belief and our military assessments, our intelligence assessments, are that if they organize themselves correctly, all of the Arab states have an untapped potential that is very, very significant to be able to push back against any of these activities," he said.
gee who saw that coming? why everyone except the sycophants who have been heaping praise on obama and kerry for accomplishing less than nothing....good job dimwits...
mach es sehr schnell
'exponential reciprocation'- The practice of always giving back more than you take....
Bubba wrote:Root cause analysis suggests it's OUR fault; those who voted and those who didn't vote. We (collectively) get the government we deserve.
I didn't vote for anyone presently in office that represents me on the state or federal level & yes I vote. So how's it my fault?
In the aggregate, not the individual sense, but you knew that already....
"Abandon hope all ye who enter here"
Killington Zone
You can checkout any time you like,
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"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function" =
F. Scott Fitzgerald
"There's nothing more frightening than ignorance in action" - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Judith Levine, who contributes to liberal media outlets like AARP, Salon and the New York Times, published a piece in the radical CounterPunch magazine in which she argues that we should not prosecute young males who commit sexual assault if they are black.
While writing an article concerning the Sayreville hazing incident, Levine does like most liberals, she says some completely idiotic things.
During the Sayreville incident seven black students sexually assaulted their younger teammates in what can best be described as “locker-room butt play”. According to the Star-Ledger, the minority students involved in the sexual assault are all to be tried as juveniles.
Shockingly, Judith disagrees with not only the sexual predators being tried as a juvenile, but she claims that they should not be tried at all. Why? Because they are black.
“If it’s true that all seven of the football players arrested for hazing in the Sayreville, New Jersey, War Memorial High School locker room are students of color, that is one more reason not to prosecute them as sexual felons.” Judith says.
“I don’t mean not to prosecute them in adult court. I mean not to prosecute them at all.”
“If they’re guilty, they should be disciplined by the school, kicked off the Bombers team, and held accountable to their victims by making amends in words and deeds.”
Judith goes on to explain how they should drop all sexual assault charges and make the sexual predators say “sorry”, then to do a little community service work.
She feels that to find a criminal guilty of their crime is far more life-crushing than being punched, kicked, groped, or having unwanted fingers inching into your anus.
“But the punishment the state will mete out far outweighs the transgression. For kids who are 15 to 17 years old, it will be life crushing.”
“Yes, more life-crushing even than being punched, kicked, groped, or subject to an unwanted finger inching into your anus.” Judith Levine wrote.
Judith continues her defense of not only these sexual predators, but all perverts around America.
“There are 785,000 Americans on the sex offender registries, all but banished from society. These people may have committed a vicious rape at gunpoint or urinated on a tree. Or chatted online with a federal agent masquerading as a teenage girl.”
“Or pressed a finger into a clothed anus.”
Judith Levine then goes on to question if the legal system should continue to lock people up if they are black, or “brown skinned”. In her defense to allow a free pass to anyone that is black, or brown, she claims that the prison system is already flooded with “black and brown kids”, so we shouldn’t lock up any other “black or brown kids” regardless of their sexual crimes.
“And in a nation already overflowing with prisoners both juvenile and adult, the vast majority of them black and brown, do we need to lock up more black and brown kids?” Judith wrote.
Judith Levine ends her article by saying “The sex offender regime is cruel and unusual punishment, excessive even for people who have committed heinous crimes.
For these teenagers, whose “sex crimes” were to grab some ass and maybe stick a finger up that ass, it is a massively disproportionate penalty – a life sentence, before their adult lives have begun.”
What are your thoughts? Comment below.
One
as we slowly devolve into virtual anarchy followed thereafter by totalitarianism...
mach es sehr schnell
'exponential reciprocation'- The practice of always giving back more than you take....
President Obama has a habit of asserting strategic nonsense with such certainty that it is at times embarrassing and frightening. Nowhere is that more evident than in his rhetoric about the Middle East.
Not long ago, Obama reassured the world that, despite evidence of the use of chemical weapons in Syria, “Chlorine itself is not listed as a chemical weapon.” What could he have meant by that? Obama apparently was referring to the focus on Sarin gas by the Organization for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the UN watchdog agency that was supposed to monitor Obama’s Syria red line warnings against further gas attacks. To reassure the public that the United States would not consider chlorine gas a violation of its own red line about chemical weapons use in Syria—and, therefore, to assure the public that his administration would not intervene militarily in Syria—Obama said: “Chlorine itself, historically, has not been listed as a chemical weapon.”
Nothing could be further from the truth. Chlorine was the father of poison gas, the first chemical agent used in World War I—and it was used to lethal effect by the Germans at the battle of Ypres in April 1915. Subsequently, it was mixed and upgraded with phosgene gas to make an even deadlier brew and employed frequently throughout the war—most infamously at the Battle of the Somme.
The president was clearly bothered that he had boxed himself into a rhetorical corner and might have had to order air strikes against the defiant Assad regime—lest he appear wavering in carrying out his earlier threats. One way out of that dilemma would be to deny that chorine constituted a serious weapon used to kill soldiers and civilians. Another would simply be to claim that he had never issued such a red line to Bashar al-Assad at all. That refuge is exactly what Obama fell back upon at press conference on September 4, 2013: “I didn’t set a red line. The world set a red line.”
Here is what the president had earlier stated on August 20, 2012, in threatening Assad: “We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation.”
The use of the presidential pronouns “we” and “my” are synonymous with the voice of his administration. Indeed, Obama had doubled down on his 2012 red line with the clarification that, “When I said that the use of chemical weapons would be a game-changer, that wasn’t unique to—that wasn’t a position unique to the United States and it shouldn’t have been a surprise.”
In the summer of 2014, Obama had dismissed the emergence of ISIS with colorful language about its inability to project terrorism much beyond its local Iraqi embryo: “I think the analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a JV team puts on Lakers uniforms, that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant. I think there is a distinction between the capacity and reach of a bin Laden and a network that is actively planning major terrorist plots against the homeland versus jihadists who are engaged in various local power struggles and disputes, often sectarian.”
ISIS, remember, had already conducted terrorist operations across the Mediterranean. Both organized and lone-wolf terrorists, with claims of ISIS ties or inspiration, would go on to attack Westerners from France to Texas.
Obama compounded his obfuscations by later claiming to Meet the Press anchor Chuck Todd that he had never said such a thing at all about ISIS—an assertion that was deemed false by even the liberal fact-checking organization PolitiFact. More recently, in July 2015, Obama claimed that the now growing ISIS threat could not be addressed through force of arms, assuring the world that “Ideologies are not defeated with guns, they are defeated by better ideas.”
Such a generic assertion seems historically preposterous. The defeat of German Nazism, Italian fascism, and Japanese militarism was not accomplished by Anglo-American rhetoric on freedom. What stopped the growth of Soviet-style global communism during the Cold War were both armed interventions such as the Korean War and real threats to use force such as during the Berlin Airlift and Cuban Missile Crisis— along with Ronald Reagan’s resoluteness backed by a military buildup that restored credible Western military deterrence.
In contrast, Obama apparently believes that strategic threats are not checked with tough diplomacy backed by military alliances, balances of power, and military deterrence, much less by speaking softly and carrying a big stick. Rather, crises are resolved by ironing out mostly Western-inspired misunderstandings and going back on heat-of-the moment, ad hoc issued deadlines, red lines, and step-over lines, whether to the Iranian theocracy, Vladimir Putin, or Bashar Assad.
Sometimes the administration’s faith in Western social progressivism is offered to persuade an Iran or Cuba that they have missed the arc of Westernized history—and must get back on the right side of the past by loosening the reins of their respective police states. Obama believes that engagement with Iran in non-proliferation talks—which have so far given up on prior Western insistences on third-party, out of the country enrichment, on-site inspections, and kick-back sanctions—will inevitably ensure that Iran becomes “a successful regional power.” That higher profile of the theocracy apparently is a good thing for the Middle East and our allies like Israel and the Gulf states.
In his well-publicized Cairo speech of June 2009, Obama declared that Islam had a hand in prompting the Western Renaissance and Enlightenment, as well as offering other underappreciated gifts to the West, from medicine to navigation. Obama’s tutorial was offered to remind the Muslim Brotherhood members in his audience that the West really does owe much to the Muslim World—and thus by inference should expect reciprocal consideration in the current war on terror.
In his February 2, 2015 outline of anti-ISIS strategy—itself an update of an earlier September 2014 strategic précis—Obama again insisted that “one of the best antidotes to the hateful ideologies that try to recruit and radicalize people to violent extremism is our own example as diverse and tolerant societies that welcome the contributions of all people, including people of all faiths.” The idea, a naïve one, is that because we welcome mosques on our diverse and tolerant soil, ISIS will take note and welcome Christian churches.
One of Obama’s former State Department advisors, Georgetown law professor Rosa Brooks, recently amplified that reductionist confidence in the curative power of Western progressivism. She urged Americans to tweet ISIS, which, like Iran, habitually executes homosexuals. Brooks hoped that Americans would pass on stories about and photos of the Supreme Court’s recent embrace of gay marriage: “Do you want to fight the Islamic State and the forces of Islamic extremist terrorism? I’ll tell you the best way to send a message to those masked gunmen in Iraq and Syria and to everyone else who gains power by sowing violence and fear. Just keep posting that second set of images [photos of American gays and their supporters celebrating the Supreme Court decision]. Post them on Facebook and Twitter and Reddit and in comments all over the Internet. Send them to your friends and your family. Send them to your pen pal in France and your old roommate in Tunisia. Send them to strangers.”
Such zesty confidence in the redemptive power of Western moral superiority recalls First Lady Michelle Obama’s efforts to persusade the murderous Boko Haram to return kidnapped Nigerian preteen girls. Ms. Obama appealed to Boko Haram on the basis of shared empathy and universal parental instincts. (“In these girls, Barack and I see our own daughters. We see their hopes, their dreams and we can only imagine the anguish their parents are feeling right now.”) Ms. Obama then fortified her message with a photo of her holding up a sign with the hash-tag #BringBackOurGirls.
Vladimir Putin’s Russia has added Crimea and Eastern Ukraine to his earlier acquisitions in Georgia. He is most likely eyeing the Baltic States next. China is creating new strategic realities in the Pacific, in which Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines will eventually either be forced to acquiesce or to seek their own nuclear deterrent. The Middle East has imploded. Much of North Africa is becoming a Mogadishu-like wasteland.
The assorted theocrats, terrorists, dictators, and tribalists express little fear of or respect for the U.S. They believe that the Obama administration does not know much nor cares about foreign affairs. They may be right in their cynicism. A president who does not consider chlorine gas a chemical weapon could conceivably believe that the Americans once liberated Auschwitz, that the Austrians speak an Austrian language, and that the Falklands are known in Latin America as the Maldives.
Both friends and enemies assume that what Obama or his administration says today will be either rendered irrelevant or denied tomorrow. Iraq at one point was trumpeted by Vice President Joe Biden as the administration’s probable “greatest achievement.” Obama declared that Iraq was a “stable and self-reliant” country in no need of American peacekeepers after 2011.
Yanking all Americans out of Iraq in 2011 was solely a short-term political decision designed as a 2012 reelection talking point. The American departure had nothing to do with a disinterested assessment of the long-term security of the still shaky Iraqi consensual government. When Senator Obama damned the invasion of Iraq in 2003; when he claimed in 2004 that he had no policy differences with the Bush administration on Iraq; when he declared in 2007 that the surge would fail; when he said in 2008 as a presidential candidate that he wanted all U.S. troops brought home; when he opined as President in 2011 that the country was stable and self-reliant; when he assured the world in 2014 that it was not threatened by ISIS; and when in 2015 he sent troops back into an imploding Iraq—all of these decisions hinged on perceived public opinion, not empirical assessments of the state of Iraq itself. The near destruction of Iraq and the rise of ISIS were the logical dividends of a decade of politicized ambiguity.
After six years, even non-Americans have caught on that the more Obama flip-flops on Iraq, deprecates an enemy, or ignores Syrian redlines, the less likely American arms will ever be used and assurances honored.
The world is going to become an even scarier place in the next two years. The problem is not just that our enemies do not believe our President, but rather that they no longer even listen to him.
Killington Zone
You can checkout any time you like,
but you can never leave
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function" =
F. Scott Fitzgerald
"There's nothing more frightening than ignorance in action" - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Written with a heavy bias, I liked this paragraph specifically:
Mainstream Americans feel marginalized – pushed to the back of the pack, while the plight of transgenders in the military or imprisoned blacks takes center stage. Worse, they have been lectured and held accountable for the country’s problems. Obama has hinted that white Christian Americans are racist -- indifferent to the travails of blacks and Hispanics and unreasonably hostile to Muslims.
While I don't oppose transgenders in the military or fixing our prison system, I do agree with feeling marginalized. It's as if today the minority are more powerful than the majority - politicians are pandering to the minority groups. While I spend my energy working, travelling, educating myself, raising my children, and living the American dream ... the minority use their energy to make demands of Washington to help fulfill their American dream.
What's missing today is accountability. The lack of accountability seems to be everywhere.
Written with a heavy bias, I liked this paragraph specifically:
Mainstream Americans feel marginalized – pushed to the back of the pack, while the plight of transgenders in the military or imprisoned blacks takes center stage. Worse, they have been lectured and held accountable for the country’s problems. Obama has hinted that white Christian Americans are racist -- indifferent to the travails of blacks and Hispanics and unreasonably hostile to Muslims.
While I don't oppose transgenders in the military or fixing our prison system, I do agree with feeling marginalized. It's as if today the minority are more powerful than the majority - politicians are pandering to the minority groups. While I spend my energy working, travelling, educating myself, raising my children, and living the American dream ... the minority use their energy to make demands of Washington to help fulfill their American dream.
What's missing today is accountability. The lack of accountability seems to be everywhere.
mach es sehr schnell
'exponential reciprocation'- The practice of always giving back more than you take....
XJ1, well said. Obama would have never had a second term if he pulled all of this cr@p in the first. Never hear him mention the debt anymore? He's set race relations back 50 years and opened deep wounds which will not be healed in our lifetimes. He can't be gone soon enough.
Written with a heavy bias, I liked this paragraph specifically:
Mainstream Americans feel marginalized – pushed to the back of the pack, while the plight of transgenders in the military or imprisoned blacks takes center stage. Worse, they have been lectured and held accountable for the country’s problems. Obama has hinted that white Christian Americans are racist -- indifferent to the travails of blacks and Hispanics and unreasonably hostile to Muslims.
While I don't oppose transgenders in the military or fixing our prison system, I do agree with feeling marginalized. It's as if today the minority are more powerful than the majority - politicians are pandering to the minority groups. While I spend my energy working, travelling, educating myself, raising my children, and living the American dream ... the minority use their energy to make demands of Washington to help fulfill their American dream.
What's missing today is accountability. The lack of accountability seems to be everywhere.
freeski wrote:XJ1, well said. Obama would have never had a second term if he pulled all of this cr@p in the first. Never hear him mention the debt anymore? He's set race relations back 50 years and opened deep wounds which will not be healed in our lifetimes. He can't be gone soon enough.
Bad thing is, if Hillary is elected, bet you see him on the SCOTUS.
Beware of fools & trolls here, they lurk everywhere.
freeski wrote:XJ1, well said. Obama would have never had a second term if he pulled all of this cr@p in the first. Never hear him mention the debt anymore? He's set race relations back 50 years and opened deep wounds which will not be healed in our lifetimes. He can't be gone soon enough.
I don't think he set race relations back anything close to 50 years. He might even spark a higher understanding of judging by character and actions, not the color of his skin. Dr Ben Carson is doing well in his presentation of ideas. South Carollina said "No Thanks" to race baiting and Sharpton and Jackson. Here's a video of 2 black women supporting, of all people, Donald Trump:
No group is monolithic. Obama does not represent all blacks any more than he represents all tall skinny people, Hawaiians, Muslims, fathers, smokers, lawyers or Kenyans. You'd think we'd know that by now. There is a vast spectrum of thought out there in the black community, and greater exposure to that diversity is what will move race relations forward.
These two are just trying to monetize their You Tube channel. They're obviously just acting with all of their stereotypical black antics, bobbing their heads and "you go girl" statements. No, by Obama coming out and speaking about Travon Martin and Brown in the manner he did he's just stoked racial tension in the country. These kids were criminals and he stood up for them. Most important, by allowing illegals and "asylum seekers" to come into the country in droves and ruin parts of the country by not upholding federal law he has set us back 50 years.
freeski wrote:These two are just trying to monetize their You Tube channel. They're obviously just acting with all of their stereotypical black antics, bobbing their heads and "you go girl" statements. No, by Obama coming out and speaking about Travon Martin and Brown in the manner he did he's just stoked racial tension in the country. These kids were criminals and he stood up for them. Most important, by allowing illegals and "asylum seekers" to come into the country in droves and ruin parts of the country by not upholding federal law he has set us back 50 years.
File under sad, but true.
You'd prefer Stepin Fetchit?
"Abandon hope all ye who enter here"
Killington Zone
You can checkout any time you like,
but you can never leave
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function" =
F. Scott Fitzgerald
"There's nothing more frightening than ignorance in action" - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
