Obama

[Barney 0]

Over here this weekend. We're making him watch Jedward apparently.

[Park Life 71]

Key European Union leaders also backed Mr Obama's speech.

 

UK Foreign Secretary William Hague praised President Obama's "clear message that the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps".

 

German Chancellor Angela Merkel called it "a good, viable path that both sides should consider".

 

Arab League chief, Amr Moussa, also called on President Obama to remain committed to the 1967 borders plan. BBC

 

 

Not sure what his game is, no way in hell that Is Ra El will agree to go back to the 1967 lines...

[Happy Face 29]

Trying to win over the Arabs with speechifying. He'll never put the words into action.

[Park Life 71]

Trying to win over the Arabs with speechifying. He'll never put the words into action.

 

Found this...Look at the date..

 

From The Sunday Times

November 16, 2008

Barack Obama links Israel peace plan to 1967 borders deal

Uzi Mahnaimi in Tel Aviv and Sarah Baxter

 

Barack Obama is to pursue an ambitious peace plan in the Middle East involving the recognition of Israel by the Arab world in exchange for its withdrawal to pre-1967 borders, according to sources close to America’s president-elect.

 

Obama intends to throw his support behind a 2002 Saudi peace initiative endorsed by the Arab League and backed by Tzipi Livni, the Israeli foreign minister and leader of the ruling Kadima party.

 

The proposal gives Israel an effective veto on the return of Arab refugees expelled in 1948 while requiring it to restore the Golan Heights to Syria and allow the Palestinians to establish a state capital in east Jerusalem.

 

On a visit to the Middle East last July, the president-elect said privately it would be “crazy” for Israel to refuse a deal that could “give them peace with the Muslim world”, according to a senior Obama adviser. "

[Billy Castell 0]

There will never be any peace in the middle east. Not until someone removes the ultra orthodox dickheads and the lobby in the USA who back them up. And that will never happen, just like the settlers will never be removed from the West bank, and Israel will never be brought to book over the countless human rights abuses and atrocities.

[Park Life 71]

There will never be any peace in the middle east. Not until someone removes the ultra orthodox dickheads and the lobby in the USA who back them up. And that will never happen, just like the settlers will never be removed from the West bank, and Israel will never be brought to book over the countless human rights abuses and atrocities.

ale

Think there is trouble brewing for Israel. New Egytptian lot will open food and supplies to Palestine and Obama seems to be going along with the 2002 directive.

 

Turkey is sending another aid flotillla and says they will act if Israel attacks it.

 

China is loading Iran up with anti-aircraft missiles and so on...

 

If Obama means business and cuts military aid all bets are off. They simply can't survive without it.

 

Turkey is a NATO MEMBER. Shit could get real.

Edited May 21, 2011 by Park Life

[Billy Castell 0]

I'd be surprised if he did cut funds. He'd lose a fair few votes from the 'Israel can do no wrong' bunch. You're right about the relianceon the aid though.

[Park Life 71]

I'd be surprised if he did cut funds. He'd lose a fair few votes from the 'Israel can do no wrong' bunch. You're right about the relianceon the aid though.

 

For the first time in a long time I sense problems for Israel. The whole middle east game has changed. Turkey as I said earlier is a wild card and the type of people who might have a crack..

 

Little known fact is that Sweden banned all Israeli flagged or crewed ships from their ports after the last flotilla attack where a Swede was killed.

 

 

 

 

JERUSALEM — A natural gas terminal was blown up in Egypt’s northern Sinai Peninsula on Wednesday, forcing the shutdown of a pipeline supplying gas to Israel and Jordan, according to Egyptian and Israeli officials. It was the second such act of sabotage since the start of the upheaval that toppled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

 

Energy officials in Israel said the country’s electric company would switch to domestically produced natural gas and other fuels to make up for the shortfall and ensure uninterrupted power supply. Israel gets 40 percent of its natural gas from Egypt, and Jordan relies on the gas imports for 80 percent of its electricity needs.

Edited May 22, 2011 by Park Life

[Rob W 0]

In the Dark Past, at Uni, the guy teaching the Political Geography course made the point that no nation ever WITHDRAWS to "defendable frontiers" - they're always out ahead of you, on someone else s land...................

[Park Life 71]

In the Dark Past, at Uni, the guy teaching the Political Geography course made the point that no nation ever WITHDRAWS to "defendable frontiers" - they're always out ahead of you, on someone else s land...................

 

America being the best case in point.

[Park Life 71]

The look of love?

 

 

 

Go on Bammy have im!!

Edited May 22, 2011 by Park Life

[Rob W 0]

In the Dark Past, at Uni, the guy teaching the Political Geography course made the point that no nation ever WITHDRAWS to "defendable frontiers" - they're always out ahead of you, on someone else s land...................

 

America being the best case in point.

 

 

wrong Parky - they regularly swop bits of Texas with Mexico and the northern border has been agreed for centuries

 

The Zionists are the worst - even Russia gave away Finland in 1917 and the republics in the 90's

[Park Life 71]

Bammy backing off.

 

Neta says 1967 off the menu.

 

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/us-iran-e...t=Google+Reader

[ewerk 31195]

Just touched down to discover his roots/play to the Irish vote.

[Craig 6700]

Willing to bet that's the last time Michelle Obama will be drinking Guinness. Face like a bulldog licking a wasp!

 

[Billy Castell 0]

Barrack's getting stuck in though by the looks of things. Don't blame Michelle, Guinness/stout is shit.

[Barney 0]

Guinness is amazing.

[JonGoodwyn 1]

Theres a video of him taking a nice gulp of it on the BBC website

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-13507730

[Barney 0]

 

I feel so patriotic.

[Happy Face 29]

 

I feel so patriotic.

 

 

They dressed appropriately then.

[Kevin S. Assilleekunt 1]

That's just fucking wrong. Would they send Jedward to a honky? Absolute fucking pisstake.

[Kid Dynamite 7169]

[Barney 0]

That's just fucking wrong. Would they send Jedward to a honky? Absolute fucking pisstake.

 

That room represented the cream of Irish culture.

[Happy Face 29]

A lot of people are talking about Frank Rich’s explosive new article in New York magazine. I think it is a remarkable thing, the latest and maybe the most comprehensive in an increasingly lengthy series of articles and investigations into the Obama administration’s failure to properly investigate the causes of the financial crisis.

 

By now this is not quite a mainstream media drumbeat, but it’s coming close: between the reporting of Louise Story and Gretchen Morgenson at the New York Times to the recent not-terribly-laudatory piece on New York Southern District U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara by the New Yorker’s George Packer, to Eliot Spitzer’s bitter commentary on the subject on CNN, to my own bleatings, and now this Rich broadside, it seems quite clear that the Obama administration’s failure to clean up Wall Street is becoming a matter of some fascination with the few investigative journalists who are not covering the Casey Anthony case.

 

Rich’s thesis is that this issue is becoming important not just to reporters, but to voters, and that Obama may soon pay for his failures at the polls:

 

Obama can win reelection without carrying 10021 or Greenwich in any case. The bigger political problem is that a far larger share of the American electorate views him as a tool of the very fat-cat elite that despises him.

 

In making this point, Rich uses language that seems unusually savage for him:

 

For all the lurid fantasies of the birthers, the dirty secret of Obama’s background is that the values of Harvard, not of Kenya or Indonesia or Bill Ayers, have most colored his governing style. He falls hard for the best and the brightest white guys.

 

Yikes! That last line is truly brutal and I imagine will not be forgotten inside the White House, which once must have viewed Rich as one of Obama’s great supporters in the punditry world. A lot of journalists, myself included, were once enthralled by Obama, and saw his election as a rare uplifting moment in our electoral history, with the candidate himself performing with tremendous grace and class as he helped slay the country’s racial demons. Some of us even thought that Obama might be that rare, once-in-a-generation-type political talent who could help the country rise above itself, an MLK or a Roosevelt.

 

I say might. Because throughout 2008, it was hard to shake the feeling that this was a politician whose legacy could still go either way. There were an awful lot of troubling signs on the horizon in Obama’s campaign, not the least of which being the enthusiastic support he was receiving from Wall Street.

 

Obama in part ran a very slightly economically populist campaign, but the tens of millions pouring into his campaign coffers from the very rich (and specifically from hedge funds) told all of us that we probably shouldn’t expect those promises to come off. For a piece I wrote that summer, I asked people in Washington why Wall Street would be throwing money at a guy who was out there on the stump pledging to reach into their pockets:

 

Sadly,

the answer to that question increasingly appears to be that Obama is full of shit.

He has made no bones about his plans to raise income by soaking the rich, promising to roll back the Bush tax cuts for people making over $250,000, increase the top tax rate on capital gains to 25 percent and raise the top rate on qualified dividends. He has also pledged to deliver a real stomach punch to hedge-fund managers, raising the tax rate on most of their income from 15 percent to 35 percent.

 

These populist pledges sound good, but many business moguls appear to be betting that the tax policies, like Obama himself, are only that: something that sounds good. "I think we don't want to make too much of his promises on taxes," says Robert Pollin, professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts. "Not all of these things will happen." Noting the overwhelming amount of Wall Street money pouring into Obama's campaign, even elitist fuckwad David Brooks was recently moved to write, "Once the Republicans are vanquished, I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for that capital-gains tax hike."

 

Disgustingly, Brooks turned out to be right, and the narrative of the Obama presidency did end up turning sour, on that front anyway. All of these articles are now chronicling how and why that happened.

 

The gist of this blistering Rich piece is that Obama came to office at a time of unprecedented hardship and public discontent, and made a mistake in deciding not to ride that anger and take an axe to those guilty of destroying the economy. Rich isn’t saying that Obama needed to put a guillotine on Maiden Lane; he’s saying that Obama’s big problem was that his failure to clean up Wall Street coincided with a similarly inexplicable failure to address the unemployment problem:

 

Howard Dean rage has never been Obama’s style—hope-and-change was an elegant oratorical substitute—and had he given full voice to the public mood, he would have been pilloried as an “angry black man.” But Obama didn’t have to play Huey Long. He could have pursued a sober but determined execution of justice and an explicit, major jobs initiative—of which there have been exactly none, the too-small stimulus included, to the present day.

 

Rich goes on to argue, very convincingly, that Obama decided to pass on the unemployment issue because he accepted the advice of Bob Rubin acolytes like Tim Geithner, who urged the president to move instead toward the Tea Party and take up the “austerity” mantle:

 

A once-hoped-for WPA-style public-works program, unloved by Geithner, had been downsized in the original stimulus, and now a tardy, halfhearted stab at a $50 billion transportation-infrastructure jobs bill produced a dandy Obama speech but nothing else.

 

Obama soon retreated into the tea-party mantra of fiscal austerity… It’s his fault, no one else’s, that he seems diffident about the unemployed. Each time there’s a jolt in the jobless numbers, he and his surrogates compound that profile by farcically reshuffling the same clichés, from “stuck in a ditch” to “headwinds” (first used by Geithner in March 2009—retire it already!) to “bumps in the road.” It’s true the administration has caught few breaks and the headwinds have been strong, but voters have long since tuned out this monotonous apologia. The White House’s repeated argument that the stimulus saved as many as 3 million jobs, accurate though it may be, is another nonstarter when 14 million Americans are looking for work.

 

Rich in this way describes the central failure of the Obama presidency. Obama entered the White House in the middle of a great economic crisis, and his Geithner/Rubin solution was to spend mind-boggling amounts bailing out Wall Street, while extracting no conditions or reforms in exchange, and punishing no one. Then, by abandoning jobs programs and taking up the Tea Party’s “austerity” model, he essentially asked ordinary Americans to foot the bill for this no-strings-attached rescue program.

 

Rich thinks that this is going to hurt him with voters next fall, and he may be right. It could also be that Americans don’t particularly care about Obama’s failure to deal with Wall Street (or, more specifically, to clean up his completely broken and corrupted regulatory apparatus), and the administration’s political calculus is that that apathy and unfamiliarity with the root causes of the crisis will be such that there’s no real downside to continuing to take mountains of financial-sector cash while slow-rolling the cleanup.

 

If that’s what the Obama administration is thinking, I can certainly see the logic there. They may well be right that to solve the problem of getting re-elected in 2012, the president’s best bet is to take care of the Citigroups and JP Morgans on his Pioneer list, blow Romney or Bachmann away on the spending front, and then non-act and non-police his way straight into a second term.

 

But the problem is that doing that leaves the whole running-the-country matter unresolved. He might win re-election, but by taking this course of non-action, he’s risking another 2008-style crash, which Rich correctly points out would render the results of next year’s election irrelevant:

 

The alternative is a failure of historic proportions. Those who gamed the economy to near devastation—so much so that the nation turned to an untried young leader in desperation and in hope—would once again inherit the Earth. Unless and until there’s a purging of the crimes that brought our president to his unlikely Inauguration Day, much more in America than the second term of his administration will be at stake.

 

More and more, I hear that Obama’s hands-off-Wall-Street policy is a matter of concern within what used to be his own circle – Beltway professionals, intellectuals, lobbyists, academics, etc. Pretty clearly, that concern is bleeding into the mainstream press now. It’ll be interesting to see if Rich is right about it bleeding into the voter pool next.

 

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs...-obama-20110706

 

I’m not alone in marveling at the extent to which Obama has thrown his rhetorical weight behind anti-Keynesian economics; Ryan Avent is equally amazed, as are many others. And now he’s endorsing the structural unemployment story too.

 

To those defending Obama on the grounds that he’s saying what he has to politically, I have two answers. First, words matter — as people who rallied around Obama in the first place because of his eloquence should know. Yes, he has to make compromises on policy grounds — but that doesn’t mean he has to adopt the right’s rhetoric and arguments. The effect of his intellectual capitulation is that we now have only one side in the national argument.

 

Second, since Obama keeps talking nonsense about economics, at what point do we stop giving him credit for actually knowing better? Maybe at some point we have to accept that he believes what he’s saying.

 

The question then is why. As I’ve tried to show many times, the facts overwhelmingly refute the anti-Keynes talking points. Neither the invisible bond vigilantes nor the confidence fairy have made an appearance. So why is Obama talking up those talking points?

 

OK, here’s an unprofessional speculation: maybe it’s personal. Maybe the president just doesn’t like the kind of people who tell him counterintuitive things, who say that the government is not like a family, that it’s not right for the government to tighten its belt when Americans are tightening theirs, that unemployment is not caused by lack of the right skills. Certainly just about all the people who might have tried to make that argument have left the administration or are leaving soon.

 

And what’s left, I’m afraid, are the Very Serious People. It looks as if those are the people the president feels comfortable with. And that, of course, is a tragedy.

 

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/0...keynes-mystery/

[Park Life 71]

Think he plans to fuck up America cause he was teased as a child.