June 10, 2013 - 3:23 pm
One senator, two messages, depending on who he’s talking to.
When he speaks to conservatives, Rubio is tough on border security.
Linking Temporary Status To Security Triggers: No undocumented immigrant is eligible to apply for temporary status until the border security and fencing plan is in place. After being in the temporary status for at least ten years, no currently undocumented immigrant can even attain permanent residence, much less citizenship, unless the border security, employment verification and exit system triggers have been achieved.
But when speaking to a Hispanic audience on Univision, Rubio sounds a completely different tone.
In his own appearance on the Spanish-language Univision network, Mr. Rubio tried to assuage some Hispanics who fear that their legal status will be held hostage to border security. Mr. Rubio said illegal immigrants will get quick legal status and work permits regardless of whether the borders are secure — but won’t be given a full pathway to citizenship until more enforcement is imposed.
“Nobody is talking here about preventing legalization. Legalization will take place,” Mr. Rubio told Univision in an interview scheduled to air Sunday.
“First comes legalization, then comes this border security measure and then comes the permanent residency process. What we are talking about here is the permanent residency system,” Mr. Rubio said. “Regarding legalization, a vast majority of my colleagues have already accepted that: that it must take place and that it must start at the same time we start with what has to do with security. That is not conditional. Legalization is not conditional.”
And there goes what’s left of Marco Rubio’s credibility. All of this should be simple: Those who have respected the law have nothing to fear. Those who have not, have no business making demands of anyone else.
The best word to describe these policy differences Rubio spells out when he talks to different audiences that he obviously assumes will not hear about the message he delivers to the other group is “corrupt.”
It’s corrupt. Down to the core. Also dishonest, and disingenuous, take your pick.
Rubio will do for Texas what Reagan did for California: create a permanent Mexican dominated, Democratic controlled welfare state.
ReplyDeleteThe fact is there is no urgency to give status of any kind to masses of people that are breaking US law.
Is there an urgency to give tax amnesty to everyone that owes taxes?
Is there an urgency to offer mass amnesty to people that have long term open traffic tickets or who owe years of child support?
The number of people that show up at the polls that are Hispanic increases by 2% every 4 years.
ReplyDeleteThe Republican Party either makes its peace with the Latinos, or there will never be another GOP President.
Rick Perry Vetoes Equal Pay for Women Bill
ReplyDeleteThe pubs don't need any help committing suicide. They're doing just fine on their own.
Of course, they refused to expand Medicaid (even with the Federal Governmnent paying 100% of the cost - 90% after 3 yrs.)
DeleteThat denies healthcare to over a million people - again, in spite of the fact that the Feds are paying for it.
Naw, they don't need any Jack Kevorkians.
Think about it - What did Obama get? 40% of the White, Male vote? And, he still won easily?
ReplyDeleteActually, I guess he got less White Males than that. He got 40% of the White vote, overall, and did considerably better among the women than with the men. The number 37% is sticking in my head.
DeleteSo. When you've reached the point when 2/3rds of your group can't elect the President, you're just another "voting bloc."
DeleteIn this case, a voting bloc with suicidal tendencies toward ALL Other voting blocs.
And these figures mirror the voting patterns of 2008. His entire margin of victory that year came from younger voters who were more educated, less religious, more racially diverse, and generally more socially and economically liberal than the average Republican voter.
DeleteAs many reputable pollsters and political scientists have been saying for months, the Republican Party is facing demographic extinction. It is shrinking to a core that is white, over age 50, mostly male, mostly evangelical Christian, and mostly lives in rural areas of the former Confederacy and the Plains states.
That's the math. And all the screaming by conservatives about "skewed" polling can't change the reality that the algorithmic approach to crunching polling numbers as epitomized by Nate Silver, famed and often hated for his "FiveThirtyEight" column in the New York Times, works.
As Esquire magazine's culture blogger Stephen Marche put it, "Math wins."
The numbers on Silver's FiveThirtyEight blog that we've seen over the past few weeks became the election results because, Marche wrote, "his opponents spoke from the gut. And like everyone who has ever played poker seriously knows, when the math disagrees with your gut, it's because your gut is wrong."
And that's why Glenn Beck, George Will, Dick Morris, Ed Morrissey, Larry Kudlow, Newt Gingrich, and Michael Barone all predicted Mitt Romney would get 310 electoral votes, rather than a hundred less, as he actually recieved. That's why Karl Rove was sputtering on Fox News Channel all night. They went with their gut against the numbers. They lost.
The Republicans who did pay attention to the math tried their best to suppress the votes of the young and the non-white. They lost, too.
The American Reporter
DeleteI seriously love your blog.. Excellent colors & theme.
ReplyDeleteDid you make this website yourself? Please reply
back as I'm planning to create my own site and would like to find out where you got this from or what the theme is called. Appreciate it!
My website fans facebook français ()
There are between ten and twenty million undocumented Americans living in the United States. hat is a whole bunch of folks.
ReplyDeletehey have relatives and friends that are documented, many of whom are citizens, of which a growing number of which participate in elections. The friends and relatives of the undocumented have bought int the "American Dream", they are going to vote.
If those Texas Hispanics ever start voting, there will be a new blue state.
ReplyDeleteI've been reading about Jan Brewer kicking the boys' asses on that Medicaid expansion; will wonders never cease.
Texas, and California are Identical as regards % of latino/Hispanic population.
ReplyDelete37.6%
Hispanic population by State
California, on the other hand, has a Much Higher Median Family Income.
Delete$52,214.00 vs. $43,425.00.
Higher taxes would make up for some of it, but, by all means, not all of it.
U.S. States by Median Income
DeleteMaybe Reagan didn't do so badly, after all. :)
OK, so there's this old poker saying that "you judge a wood-chopper by the pile of chips."
ReplyDeleteI would say, "you judge an economist by how many times he's been right in the past."
This was written in 2008:
What a model with all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed actually says is that the CPI doubles if you double the current money supply and all future expected money supplies.
And how do you do that? No matter how much Japan increases the monetary base now, expectations of future money supplies won’t move if people believe that the Bank of Japan will move to stabilize the price level as soon as the economy recovers. And once you realize that central banks may not be able to move expectations about future money supplies, it becomes a real possibility that the economy will be in a liquidity trap: if interest rates are near zero, money printed now just gets hoarded, and monetary policy has no traction on the real economy.
Zimbabwe wouldn’t have this problem: people believe that any money it prints will stay in circulation. But the likes of Japan, or the United States, print money for policy purposes, not to pay their bills. And that, perversely, is what makes them vulnerable to a liquidity trap. Back in 1998 I argued that the Bank of Japan needed to find a way to “credibly promise to be irresponsible.” That didn’t go down too well, but it was what sober, careful economic analysis prescribed.
Or as I said in the linked paper,
The whole subject of the liquidity trap has a sort of Alice-through-the-looking-glass quality. Virtues like saving, or a central bank known to be strongly committed to price stability, become vices; to get out of the trap a country must loosen its belt, persuade its citizens to forget about the future, and convince the private sector that the government and central bank aren’t as serious and austere as they seem.
OK, so now back to . . . . .
Macro policy in a Liquidity Trap - or, how to convince the world that you are going to be seriously irresponsible
It’s a curious thing that even now, when we are clearly in a liquidity trap, we still have a lot of economists denying that such a thing is possible. The argument seems to go like this: creating inflation is easy — birds do it, bees do it, Zimbabwe does it. So it can’t really be a problem for competent countries like Japan or the United States.
DeleteThis misses a key point that I and others tried to make for Japan in the 90s and are trying to make again now: creating inflation is easy if you’re an irresponsible country. It may not be easy at all if you aren’t.
A decade ago, when I tried to make sense of Japan’s predicament, I used a simple, unrealistic model to ask what we really know about the relationship between the money supply and the price level. We normally say that an increase in the money supply, other things equal, leads to an equal proportional increase in the price level: double M and you double the CPI. But that’s not actually right.
He had it nailed, from the start.
The Jack Kevorkian of the Republican Party, look no further than their Standard Bearer of 2008.
ReplyDeleteJohn McCain wants to arm al-Quieda with heavy weapons.
Surface to air missiles and anti-tank weaponry.
Want to watch the GOP slip into political obscurity, let them follow John 'Crown Prince of the Pacific' McCain and support arming al-Quieda in Syria..
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DeleteSome can piss and moan about McCain and Graham but in the end it will be the team of Obama, Rice, Powers, and Kerry that actually take us to war in Syria.
They will/have provided the excuse just as they did in Libya, just as Bush did in Iraq.
No one remembers that Reid, Pelosi, Biden, Clinton, and Feinstein all voted for the Iraq War resolution. Today it is Bush's war.
If we go to war in Syria, it will be Obama's war.
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Maybe we should be looking for a "Jill" Kevorkian.
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that Ann Coulter might very well fit the bill, her damned self.
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ReplyDeleteIranian cleric Hassan Rouhani elected as president
Interior minister announces that moderate candidate secured just over 50% of the vote required to avoid runoff, with 72% turnout.
Iran's rial recovered its value against the dollar by more 6% as results were announced in Rouhani's favour...
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ReplyDeleteMore from the Obama braintrust.
Kerry: Syria developments 'threaten to put settlement out of reach'
Secretary of state doubts Assad's 'commitment' to negotiations given use of chemical weapons and involvement of Hezbollah...
Damascus has responded by accusing Obama of lying over the use of chemical weapons as a pretext to America's involvement in the conflict. "The White House … relied on fabricated information in order to hold the Syrian government responsible for using weapons, despite a series of statement that conformed that terrorist groups in Syria have chemical weapons," a Syrian foreign ministry spokesman said.
Yuri Ushakov, foreign policy adviser to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, cast doubt over the US assessment on the use of sarin gas. After being briefed by Washington, Ushakov noted that "what was presented to us by the Americans does not look convincing".
"It would be hard even to call them facts," he said...
Obama has surrounded himself with warmongering women with Kerry being one of the more prominent ones.
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Matt Williams in New York
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 15 June 2013 12.35 EDT
Jump to comments (7)
John Kerry told the Iraq foreign minister the US was seeking a non-military solution to the crisis in Syria. Photograph: Yuri Gripas/Reuters
The American secretary of state, John Kerry, warned on Saturday that what the US believes to be Syria's use of chemical weapons against rebels and the creeping role played by Hezbollah in the conflict "threatened to put a political settlement out of reach".
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete.
ReplyDeleteNSA and other scandals?
Yet Obama has flippantly dismissed the controversy. Resorting to the worst tactics of the Bush years, his message is: "Trust us. We're the good guys." And then Congress is briefed – in secret, of course – about the "dozens" of terrorist plots such industrial-scale espionage has stopped.
No one in that hall in Boston in 2004 could have imagined that the young, eloquent and inspiring politician would have transformed so dramatically less than a decade later. Yet the Age of Obama is not one of hope and change; it is the era of the National Security President. Obama has overseen increasing use of drones, in a targeted killing programme across the globe. No doubt they wipe out legitimate targets. But the drones also murder American citizens – such as Anwar al-Awlaki and his son Abdulraman in 2011 – with no trial amid a legal framework that – again – is kept largely secret. They wipe out wedding parties by accident. Any "military-aged male" in a drone strike zone is called a legitimate target, turning the innocent into the guilty to justify death from above. Then there is Guantánamo Bay, that bleeding sore on the face of American civil liberties. It is a tropical gulag of 166 men – more than half cleared for release but still kept behind bars – who are starving themselves out of desperation. Obama promised to close it down in 2008. He failed. He promised again last month. But nothing has happened. Meanwhile, the regime inside the camp is growing more savage.
Obama has cracked down aggressively on whistleblowers, using the Espionage Act – a hangover from the first world war – more times than all his predecessors combined. He has presided over an explosion of over-classification, as millions of government documents are shuttered away from public eyes. His Department of Justice has collected the phone records of AP journalists and accessed the emails of a Fox News reporter.
It's the stuff of conspiracy theorist fantasies. But these abuses of power are real and are playing out the front pages of America's papers every day. When the IRS searched for conservative groups to target for special treatment, it confirmed the worst fears of every rightwinger in America.
How on earth did we get here from Boston, 2004? Bush – a cipher of a politician whose only belief was in his right to rule – surrounded himself with Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, John Bolton and an army of whispering neocons. Obama does not have that excuse. When his staff meets to mull over the latest names in their killing programme – an event dubbed "Terror Tuesdays" – Obama himself is often present.
Neither is Obama ignorant of the law; he's a constitutional law professor. In turning America into a national security state, the awful truth is that he knows full well what he is doing...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/15/broken-promise-barack-obama?guni=Network front:network-front main-4 Pixies:Pixies:Position1
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ReplyDeleteMore bullshit from the bullshitter in chief.
The FBI has shrugged off growing congressional anxiety over its surveillance of US citizens, claiming such programs could have foiled the 9-11 terrorist attacks and would prevent "another Boston".
One has to ask, if Meuller was right, given that the NSA evesdropping has been going on for a decade or more, one has to say don't be telling me about "another Boston", why wasn't the "last Boston" prevented.
But Mueller's testimony before the House judicial oversight committee brought angry responses from many congressmen, who questioned whether such surveillance was lawful and demanded to know why it had failed to prevent the Boston bombing if it were so effective.
http://2164th.blogspot.com/2013/06/blog-post_15.html?showComment=1371320406833#c50274608158460415
Meuller is stepping down in September. Can't wait to see him go.
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ReplyDeleteUN hesitent to take US word on Syrian chemical weapons.
Ban said he appreciated the willingness of the United States, Britain, France and other governments to provide evidence to a U.N. team investigating the possible use of chemical weapons in Syria. But he cautioned that “any information on the alleged use of chemical weapons cannot be ensured without convincing evidence of the chain of custody.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-claims-of-chemical-weapons-against-syrian-rebels-meet-caution-at-un/2013/06/14/a736df6e-d524-11e2-a73e-826d299ff459_story.html?hpid=z2
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ReplyDeleteAs I pointed out above, the chem weapons use was merely a convenient excuse, the CYA options if you like.
President Obama’s decision to begin arming the Syrian rebels followed more than a year of internal debate over whether it was worth the dual risks of involving the United States in another war and seeing U.S. weapons fall into the hands of extremist groups among the rebels.
The White House said the final push came this week after U.S. intelligence agencies concluded with “high certainty” that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces had used chemical weapons against the rebels.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/decision-to-arm-syrian-rebels-was-reached-weeks-ago-us-officials-say/2013/06/14/3cc2d372-d51a-11e2-8cbe-1bcbee06f8f8_story.html?hpid=z1
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ReplyDeletePresident Obama, who as a Democratic senator accused the Bush administration of violating civil liberties in the name of security, now vigorously defends his own administration’s collection of Americans’ phone records and Internet activities.
Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid said he thinks Congress has done sufficient intelligence oversight. His evidence? Opinion polls.
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi defended the programs’ legality and said she wants Edward Snowden prosecuted for leaking details of the secret operations.
Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee, accused Snowden of treason and defended false testimony given to her committee by the director of national intelligence, who in March had denied the programs’ existence.
With some exceptions, progressive lawmakers and the liberal commentariat have been passive and acquiescent toward the secret spying programs, which would have infuriated the left had they been the work of a Republican administration...
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ReplyDeleteDrivers’ license information of most Americans would be accessible through a nationwide computer network if the immigration legislation pending before the Senate becomes law.
NYT
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ReplyDeleteThe Russian foreign minister said that evidence of chemical weapons use cited by the Americans was unreliable because the samples were not taken by experts or properly monitored until they reached a laboratory.
NYT
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ReplyDeleteThe way of the world, at least, the one we live in.
From the NYT opinionator piece The Stone: The Real War on Reality
Important insight into the world these companies came from a 2010 hack by a group best known as LulzSec (at the time the group was called Internet Feds), which targeted the private intelligence firm HBGary Federal. That hack yielded 75,000 e-mails. It revealed, for example, that Bank of America approached the Department of Justice over concerns about information that WikiLeaks had about it. The Department of Justice in turn referred Bank of America to the lobbying firm Hunton and Willliams, which in turn connected the bank with a group of information security firms collectively known as Team Themis.
Team Themis (a group that included HBGary and the private intelligence and security firms Palantir Technologies, Berico Technologies and Endgame Systems) was effectively brought in to find a way to undermine the credibility of WikiLeaks and the journalist Glenn Greenwald (who recently broke the story of Edward Snowden’s leak of the N.S.A.’s Prism program), because of Greenwald’s support for WikiLeaks. Specifically, the plan called for actions to “sabotage or discredit the opposing organization” including a plan to submit fake documents and then call out the error. As for Greenwald, it was argued that he would cave “if pushed” because he would “choose professional preservation over cause.” That evidently wasn’t the case...
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/the-real-war-on-reality/
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ReplyDeleteWhy mist we constantly elect pricks who feel the need 'to do something', guys who lack the balls just to say "No"?
This more benign reading of American policy would see Mr Obama’s “red line” as a case study in the use of rhetoric in geopolitics. He has been trapped by the evidence that his “red line” on the use of chemical weapons has been crossed, and feels that, for the sake of his credibility, he has to ratchet up the US response. However repugnant chemical and biological warfare might be, this is a line that should never have been drawn. One of the first rules of diplomacy is never to issue threats that you are not prepared to carry out, and it has been obvious from his dithering in recent weeks that Mr Obama was far from eager to follow through on his implied threat.
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/editorials/editorial-syrias-red-line-should-never-have-been-drawn-8659611.html
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ReplyDelete"In a sense, Obama owns Syria now," says Joshua Landis, a highly regarded Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma. "I presume he'll try to go in toe by toe.… But he has to decide what his objectives are, which he hasn't. Does he want to provide just enough arms to keep the status quo and divide Syria in two? Does he want to give them enough to take Damascus and drive the Alawites [President Bashar al-Assad's ruling sect] into the mountains? Does he want he want to see them take over the entire country?"
The evidence so far is that the administration will go no further than to try to maintain the bloody standoff, which has cost more than 90,000 lives, for the time being...
If true, and it very well could be, this points to just how cynical the US and its allies are in citing their concern over the dead in Syria. Do they, as the rat would argue, just want to keep the parties arguing amongst themselves? Doubtful. More likely they stumbled into this mess the same way they have stumbled into all the others and now it's spinning out of their control. Pushed by arrogance, incompetance, and the need 'to do something' they established 'red lines' they never should have and now risk looking like weak sisters if they do nothing.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/nationalsecurity/slip-sliding-toward-obama-s-third-war-20130614
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You have to read this; Which part ( remember this is from Pravda) of this is not true?
ReplyDeleteThe idiotic foreign policy of the USA
15.06.2013 01:03
Washington appears caught in the grip of an outdated, anachronistic and puerile, vapid, shallow foreign policy-making outfit controlled by intellectually limited political freaks of yesteryear, pandering to the whims of the lobbies that control them, insulting the collective intelligence of humankind and using lies to justify their evil plans.
I am not one of those who subscribes to the notion that all Americans are fat and stupid. My answer to those (racists/xenophobes) that say so is to ask them to try and get into an American University and then call them stupid. So, if the United States of America has such excellent schools of higher education and if the USA produces such excellent scholars, why does the country pursue such a puerile, shallow, anachronistic, outdated and idiotic foreign policy?
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DeleteContented and comfortable.
There are signs everywhere, put up by the government and the MSM, "Please do not disturb the sheeple".
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ReplyDeleteLet us take Syria as an example. After constant attempts to whitewash the Government as an "evil regime" failed, along with constant attempts to pin the Government of President Assad (which has the support of around 70 per cent of the Syrian people, more than Obama and Cameron combined), here we have the USA lying, once again, producing images from April, stating that the Syrian Government used Sarin gas.
And what do they use as evidence? The "broad range" of evidence, including "multiple" incidents of the use of chemical weapons by the "Syrian regime", as Washington claims, is based upon some footage of anti-Assad terrorists lying in beds with shaving foam around their mouths, eyes blinking and alert, holding their heads and writhing around slowly.
Is that it? Apparently. Well, I could stage a better coup myself and a more realistic one. Chemical and biological weapons cover a broad array of weaponry but the symptoms I would show if I were trying to lie to the public would include people lying in their backs, motionless, eyes vacant, with foam but not shaving cream around the mouth, vomiting uncontrollably and generally looking like they were close to death. Certainly not blinking, holding their heads and moving around.
This particular "incident" in April was covered here in this column at the time, as were previous attempts to accuse the Syrian government of using chemical and biological weapons, including attempts to smuggle chemical weapons into Syria through Turkey and then stage a false flag event to justify a war, a military intervention. Basically, it is bullshit.
And let us go further: if President Obama states that the Syrian Government is using chemical or biological weapons, based upon this, then he is a barefaced liar. And if he does make such statements it is clear that it is not President Obama that runs the USA, it is Senator McCain and his disgusting, nasty, underhanded Republican band of warmongers. I thought he lost the election years back, together with his poodle, that screaming witch from Alaska, the darling of the tea party studies in ignorance.
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ReplyDeleteIf someone cuts her/himself with a knife cutting cheese, the first time it is called an accident. The second time without using a cutting board, it is carelessness. The third time, it is stupidity. Remember 9/11? There remain huge questions to be asked as to the veracity of the Pentagon strike, as to the monitoring of the entire event, from the then National Security Advisor, why who else? Condy Rice. Sterling job.
There are enormous questions to be asked about the veracity of the casus belli providing the background to the invasion of Iraq. Remember the claims that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction? OK then ten years on, where are they? Remember the claims that Saddam Hussein was using factories to produce chemical weapons, which turned out to be milk powder for babies? Remember the claims that Saddam Hussein was posing an immediate threat to the USA and its allies? Remember the claims that Saddam Hussein was procuring yellowcake uranium from Niger to make nuclear weapons, when he didn't even have a centrifuge working?
Remember the claims that Colonel Gaddafi was slaughtering his civilians and bombing them, when there was not a shred of evidence supporting such a claim?
The point is that the FUKUS Axis (France, UK, US) has tried this tack time and time again and fuelled by a supporting bought media, has managed to whitewash public opinion, duping a gullible public brought up on chuckles, chortles and giggles based around belching on the Simpsons. And time and time again the "real" media has outed such claims as bullshit.
Yet they continue. What Washington does not say is that the anti-Assad (30%) faction contains increasing numbers of al-Qaeda operatives, as was the case in Iraq and Libya, what Washington does not say is that arming the terrorists would escalate the conflict, what Washington does not say is that NATO is providing support for the terrorists to operate through Turkey.
And NATO/FUKUS is failing. Hence the claim that the Syrian Government is using chemical/biological weapons. It is predictable as the child who claims it was not he who destroyed the entire collection of houseplants in the conservatory, but rather the plastic dinosaur he holds in his hand.
Is President Obama that plain stupid? Does he think his people are stupid? Or is he a barefaced liar? Who said "Change"? The man is a traitor to his word, an insult to humankind and a very bad example of a Nobel peace prizewinner. Let this be his political epitaph: he manages to be even worse than Bush.
Photo: President al-Assad visits Syrian soldier wounded by western-backed terrorist forces. Nice one, Barack! How many more are you going to fund to murder? How many more Syrian families are you going to destroy? Remember NATO's cold-blooded murder of the Gaddafi grandchildren? Makes you happy? Nobel peace prize indeed.... Shame on you.
Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey
Pravda.Ru
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DeleteFUKUS?
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France - UK - US
DeleteFUKUS is on the case. :) :) :)
DeleteGotta love it.
BEIRUT — Syrian troops pushed forward with their offensive against rebels Saturday, capturing a suburb near the Damascus international airport as the U.S. warned that the alleged use of chemical weapons by President Bashar Assad’s forces and the involvement of the Iranian-backed militant group Hezbollah in the civil war threaten to put a proposed political settlement out of reach.
ReplyDeleteThe U.S. and Russia have been pressing for a peace conference to end Syria’s civil war in Geneva, but prospects for that have been dampened after a series of regime battlefield victories and hardened positions by both sides as the death toll from the more than 2-year-old conflict has surged to nearly 93,000.
President Barack Obama’s decision this week to send lethal aid to Syrian rebels and the deepening involvement of trained Shiite fighters from Lebanon’s Hezbollah group also has raised the stakes, setting up a proxy fight between Iran and the West that threatens to engulf more of the Middle East.
The U.S. reversal after months of saying it would not intervene in the conflict militarily came after Washington said it had conclusive evidence the Syrian regime had used chemical weapons, something Obama had said would be a “red line.”
Syria has denied the accusations, saying Obama was lying about the evidence to justify his decision to arm the rebels. Syria’s ally Russia also suggested Saturday that the evidence put forth by the United States of the use of chemical weapons doesn’t meet stringent criteria for reliability.
You know that they are lying sacks of shit over this sarin claim. No serious analysis yet from the US media, but wait:
ReplyDeleteChemical weapons experts still skeptical of U.S. claim that Syria used sarin
By Matthew Schofield | McClatchy Washington Bureau
First Published Jun 14 2013 09:05 pm • Last Updated Jun 14 2013 09:06 pm
Washington • Chemical weapons experts voiced skepticism Friday about U.S. claims that the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad had used the nerve agent sarin against rebels on at least four occasions this spring, saying that while the use of such a weapons is always possible, they’ve yet to see the telltale signs of a sarin gas attack, despite months of scrutiny.
"It’s not unlike Sherlock Holmes and the dog that didn’t bark," said Jean Pascal Zanders, a leading expert on chemical weapons who until recently was a senior research fellow at the European Union’s Institute for Security Studies. "It’s not just that we can’t prove a sarin attack; it’s that we’re not seeing what we would expect to see from a sarin attack."
Foremost among those missing items, Zanders said, are cellphone photos and videos of the attacks or the immediate aftermath.
"In a world where even the secret execution of Saddam Hussein was taped by someone, it doesn’t make sense that we don’t see videos, that we don’t see photos, showing bodies of the dead, and the reddened faces and the bluish extremities of the affected," he said.
Other experts said that while they were willing to give the U.S. intelligence community the benefit of the doubt, the Obama administration has yet to offer details of what evidence it has and how it obtained it.
White House foreign policy adviser Benjamin Rhodes gave dates and places for the alleged attacks - March 19 in the Aleppo suburb of Khan al-Assal; April 13 in the Aleppo neighborhood of Shaykh Maqsud; May 14 in Qasr Abu Samrah in Homs province, and May 23 in Adra, east of Damascus. But he provided no details of the fighting that was taking place or the number of dead.
"Ultimately, without more information, we are left with the need to trust the integrity of the U.S. intelligence community in arriving at its ‘high confidence’ judgment," Greg Thielmann, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Arms Control Association, said in an email. While he said that "my guess is they have it right," he also noted that the White House statement was "carefully and prudentially worded" and acknowledged the lack of a "continuous chain of custody for the physiological samples from those exposed to sarin."
"It does not eliminate all doubt in my mind," he said.
Philip Coyle, a senior scientist at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington, said that without hard, public evidence, it’s difficult for experts to assess the validity of the administration’s statement. He added that from what is known, what happened doesn’t look like a series of sarin attacks to him.
"Without blood samples, it’s hard to know," he said. "But I admit I hope there isn’t a blood sample, because I’m still hopeful that sarin has not been used."
Just put a bounty on Iranian aircraft flying into Damascus Airport.
ReplyDeleteDisrupt the resupply?
Cause stalemate
In an attempt to weaken the Syrian government's air power, rebel fighters attacked several military airports across the country Sunday -- including a sprawling base in Idlib province, dissidents said.
ReplyDelete"Fighter planes have caused many deaths, so we want to end any such thing as military air power," opposition activist Jehad al-Hamwwi told CNN.
The rebel Free Syrian Army devised a plan to attack the military airports and the regime's other strategic bases, said Zukan Hded, a dissident in Idlib province.
Syrian troops and rebels battled for control of Idlib's Abu al-Zhuhoor military airport, one of the few places in the opposition-dominated province from which government forces can still inflict damage, the opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
FUKUS!
ReplyDeleteFUKUS, FUKUS, FUKUS!
DeleteI can't quit you, FUKUS. :)
It would have been fuCkus, except China said, "fuck YOU."
Delete:)
fuck You.
Delete"You crazy," Yank.