US elections 2012.

[Park Life 71]

There are 3 main things that will shape the next four years:

 

China/Russia axis

Iran

American debt/the dollar (the fed continuing to buy up Govt bonds with printed money).

 

China will also need to be convinced to stay with the dollar and continue to buy U.S. treasury debt and it will as long as its 120m people manufacturing base remains an exporter to the U.S. and Europe. But there are problems looming along the way with regard to this.

 

China is growing it's own middle class who are becoming voracious consumers of their own products and there might come a time they don't need to prop up the dollar (their export market) to balance their books (the biggest holders of treasury debt and dollar reserves on the planet). Right now attacks and stealth destabalising of the euro has massaged the weakeness of the dollar, but I believe the willpower of the Bundesbank and the ECB to support the euro has come as one mighty shock to our cousins, who imagined a quick smash and grab and unravelling of the competing currency.

 

I personally think a resutructured euro and europe will survive the current crisis (- Greece, Ireland and one other). Germany sees the euro as the trojan horse to control european monetary policy as well as furthering its agenda toward a european superstate.

 

I expect Germany to push for a seat on the security council and at some point within a decade India. This will be a whole new paradigm at the UN.

 

The stabalising and re-emergence of the euro will mean China will start to hedge against the dollar and this I expect within this presidential term. I don't say this lightly having predicted the end of the euro on 2/3 years ago. What I didn't factor in was the ability of soverign debt to be diluted over long term public borrowing without a backlash. It looks like the people have swallowed it.

 

 

Iran imo is much safer under Obama. Netenyahu was cold shouldered by Obama on his visit and apart from polite chit chat (to appease the Israeli lobby) got no consessions or guarantees from Barack. This was later confirmed by Netenyahu throwing his full weight (and his minnions in Washington) behind Romdick who more or less had guranteed a war against Iran on his visit during the campaign. The Jewish lobby have lost nearly the whole game by showing their hand and in Obama winning.

 

Other little insights came when Obama was heard (when he thought the mic was off) telling Medvedev to let Putin know he would be much more flexible after the elections were over. This would concern the missile defence and Russian concern over an attack on Iran. Russia and China will continue to vote against any kind of naked intervention in Iran (apart from soft sanctions).

 

There is also a mulit-intelligence agency report doing the rounds that advises not only against an attack on Iran but also for the first time paints Israel as perhaps a greater danger to U.S. assets and hegenomy in the middle east.

America is preparing for a middle east minus Israeli dominance. Time will tell if the Shadow Govt are going to let this play. Obama's common sense approack to Iran is his greatest danger imo and I mean personal danger.

Edited November 9, 2012 by Park Life

[Alex 34876]

http://samuel-warde.com/2012/11/cry-babies-and-sore-losers/

[Dr Gloom 21823]

there's chatter of Hillary v Jeb Bush in 2016.

[Gemmill 44422]

Jesus, the world does not need another Bush in the White House. That goes for both candidates.

[Happy Face 29]

Bush 88

Clinton 92

Clinton 96

Bush 00

Bush 04

Obama 08

Obama 12

....

Bush (Jeb) 16

Clinton (Hilary) 20

Obama (Michelle) 24

 

You can easily see 40 years of US rule under 3 families.

 

Term limits ensure democracy, Yay!

 

[Dr Gloom 21823]

Jesus, the world does not need another Bush in the White House. That goes for both candidates.

 

[PaddockLad 17111]

Bush 88

Clinton 92

Clinton 96

Bush 00

Bush 04

Obama 08

Obama 12

....

Bush (Jeb) 16

Clinton (Hilary) 20

Obama (Michelle) 24

 

You can easily see 40 years of US rule under 3 families.

 

Term limits ensure democracy, Yay!

 

 

Can't we trry to get Paula Broadwell to run?...she's no Kelly Brook, but she's causing commotion in my underwear department this morning...I think its her nasty abuse of power and trust that's turning me on, the fuckin evil scheming bitch

 

[Happy Face 29]

Can't we trry to get Paula Broadwell to run?...she's no Kelly Brook, but she's causing commotion in my underwear department this morning...I think its her nasty abuse of power and trust that's turning me on, the fuckin evil scheming bitch

 

 

Good read, and there aren't many with a salacious story like this.....

 

The fraud that General David Petraeus perpetrated on America started many years before the general seduced Paula Broadwell, a lower-ranking officer 20 years his junior, after meeting her on a campus visit to Harvard.

 

More so than any other leading military figure, Petraeus’ entire philosophy has been based on hiding the truth, on deception, on building a false image. “Perception” is key, he wrote in his 1987 Princeton dissertation: "What policymakers believe to have taken place in any particular case is what matters — more than what actually occurred."

 

Yes, it’s not what actually happens that matters — it’s what you can convince the public it thinks happened.

 

Until this weekend, Petraeus had been incredibly successful in making the public think he was a man of great integrity and honor, among other things. Most of the stories written about him fall under what we hacks in the media like to call “a blow job." Vanity Fair. The New Yorker. The New York Times. The Washington Post. Time. Newsweek. In total, all the profiles, stage-managed and controlled by the Pentagon’s multimillion dollar public relations apparatus, built up an unrealistic and superhuman myth around the general that, in the end, did not do Petraeus or the public any favors. Ironically, despite all the media fellating, our esteemed and sex-obsessed press somehow missed the actual blow job.

 

Before I lay out the Petraeus counter-narrative — a narrative intentionally ignored by most of the Pentagon press and national security reporters, for reasons I’ll soon explain — let me say this about the man once known as King David, General Betray-Us, or P4, by his admirers, his enemies, and his fellow service members, respectively. He’s an impressive guy, a highly motivated individual, a world-class bullshit artist, a fitness addict, and a man who spent more time in shitty places over the past 10 years than almost any other American serving his or her country has. I've covered him for seven years now, and he’ll always have my respect and twisted admiration.

 

So it’s fair to say that P4 probably deserves something a little better than the public humiliation he’s about to endure. Sources who long feared him have already begun to leak salacious details; one told me this weekend that he took Broadwell along with him on a government-funded trip to Paris in July 2011. And questions about his role in the Benghazi debacle are also likely to deepen.

 

And Broadwell, too, is about to get slandered in a way no woman deserves. She’s the Pentagon’s Monica Lewinksy — and, despite Team Petraeus’ much advertised lip service to courage and integrity, it didn’t take long for his allies to swarm the press with anonymous quotes smearing the West Point graduate and married mother of two: that she wore “tight clothes,” as The Washington Post reported, or that she had her “claws in him.” In other words, how could Old Dave have resisted that slut’s charms?

 

Pretty shitty behavior, all around. As Petraeus ally and counterinsurgency scholar Dr. Andrew Exum might put it, stay classy!

 

But the warning signs about Petraeus’ core dishonesty have been around for years. Here's a brief summary: We can start with the persistent questions critics have raised about his Bronze Star for Valor. Or that, in 2004, during the middle of a presidential election, Petraeus wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post supporting President Bush and saying that the Iraq policy was working. The policy wasn’t working, but Bush repaid the general’s political advocacy by giving him the top job in the war three years later.

 

There’s his war record in Iraq, starting when he headed up the Iraqi security force training program in 2004. He’s more or less skated on that, including all the weapons he lost, the insane corruption, and the fact that he essentially armed and trained what later became known as “Iraqi death squads.” On his final Iraq tour, during the so-called "surge," he pulled off what is perhaps the most impressive con job in recent American history. He convinced the entire Washington establishment that we won the war.

 

He did it by papering over what the surge actually was: We took the Shiites' side in a civil war, armed them to the teeth, and suckered the Sunnis into thinking we’d help them out too. It was a brutal enterprise — over 800 Americans died during the surge, while hundreds of thousands of Iraqis lost their lives during a sectarian conflict that Petraeus’ policies fueled. Then he popped smoke and left the members of the Sunni Awakening to fend for themselves. A journalist friend told me a story of an Awakening member, exiled in Amman, whom Petraeus personally assured he would never abandon. The former insurgent had a picture of Petraeus on his wall, but was a little hurt that the general no longer returned his calls.

 

MoveOn may have been ill-advised to attack the general as "Betray Us" in Washington, but there was little doubt that many in the Awakening felt betrayed.

 

Petraeus was so convincing on Baghdad that he manipulated President Obama into trying the same thing in Kabul. In Afghanistan, he first underhandedly pushed the White House into escalating the war in September 2009 (calling up columnists to “box” the president in) and waged a full-on leak campaign to undermine the White House policy process. Petraeus famously warned his staff that the White House was “fucking” with the wrong guy.

 

The doomed Afghanistan surge would come back to bite him in the ass, however. A year after getting the war he wanted, P4 got stuck having to fight it himself. After Petraeus frenemy General Stanley McChrystal got fired for trashing the White House in a story I published in Rolling Stone, the warrior-scholar had to deploy yet again.

 

The Afghan war was a loser, always was, and always would be — Petraeus made horrible deals with guys like Abdul Razzik and the other Afghan gangsters and killed a bunch of people who didn’t need to be killed. And none of it mattered, or made a dent in his reputation. This was the tour where Broadwell joined him at headquarters, and it’s not so shocking that he’d need to find some solace, somewhere, to get that daily horror show out of his mind.

 

(This past summer, there were more attacks in Afghanistan than in the summer before the surge, a devastating statistic. I could keep going, but if you’re interested, check out The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan.)

 

How did Petraeus get away with all this for so long? Well, his first affair — and one that matters so much more than the fact that he was sleeping with a female or two — was with the media.

 

(For the record: Who really cares whom P4 is sleeping with? The idea that the FBI was investigating his sex life says more about the FBI and our absurd surveillance and national security state than it does about King David’s morality.)

 

Petraeus’ first biographer, former U.S. News and World Report reporter Linda Robinson, wrote a book about him, then went to CENTCOM to work for him. Yes — a so-called journalist published a book about him, then started getting a paycheck from him soon after. This went largely unremarked upon.

 

Another huge supporter was Tom Ricks, a former Washington Post journalist who found a second career as unofficial press agent for the general and his friends. Ricks is the ringleader of what I like to call “the media-military industrial complex,” setting the standard for its incestuous everyday corruption. He not only built Dave up, he facilitated the disastrous liaison between Broadwell and Petraeus. Ricks helped get Broadwell a literary agent, a six-figure book deal, and a publisher.

 

Broadwell was sold to publishers as much for her looks as what she was writing — she was an attractive package to push Petraeus and his counterinsurgency ideas. Little, Brown editor Geoff Shandler once told me how “hot” he thought Broadwell was after she came in to meet him at his office, and indicated to me that Broadwell had made him somewhat aroused. Intellectual integrity all around, to be sure.

 

Ricks blurbed her in All In, and earlier had promoted her content on his blog — the oddly titled Travels With Paula, a headline he slapped to a story about the U.S. military’s total destruction of a small village in southern Afghanistan. Broadwell described the ultra-violent wipeout in favorable terms — and when she was confronted with an angry villager whose house had been destroyed, she wrote that the Afghan’s tears and anger were a “a fit of theatrics.”

 

This was the kind of bullshit Ricks and Broadwell had been pushing — and it not only wasn’t called bullshit, it was embraced as serious work.

 

Ricks wasn’t the only offender, of course — Petraeus more or less had journalists from many major media outlets slurping from the Pentagon’s gravy train. The typical route was to have all the cash and favors funneled through a third party like the Center for a New American Security.

 

CNAS was a Petraeus-inspired operation from its inception in 2007, and it made its reputation promoting Petraeus’ counterinsurgency plans. No problem, right? Except that it put the journalists who were covering those same plans and policies on its payroll. For instance, New York Times Pentagon correspondent Thom Shanker took money and a position from CNAS and still covered the Pentagon; Robert Kaplan, David Cloud from the Los Angeles Times, and others produced a small library’s worth of hagiographies while sharing office space at CNAS with retired generals whom they’d regularly quote in their stories.

 

But Petraeus’ crash is more significant than the latest nonsense sex scandal. As President Obama says, our decade of war is coming to an end.

 

The reputations of the men who were intimately involved in these years of foreign misadventure, where we tortured and supported torture, armed death squads, conducted nightly assassinations, killed innocents, and enabled corruption on an unbelievable scale, lie in tatters. McChrystal, Caldwell, and now Petraeus — the era of the celebrity general is over. Everyone is paying for their sins. (And before we should shed too many tears for the plight of King David and his men, remember, they’ll be taken care of with speaking fees and corporate board memberships, rewarded as instant millionaires by the same defense establishment they served so well.)

 

Before Dave fell for Paula, we fell for Dave. He tried to convince us that heroes aren’t human. They are human, like us, and sometimes worse.

 

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mhastings/the-sins-of-general-david-petraeus

[tooner 243]

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/World/2012/11/12/20350146.html

 

Within a week of U.S. President Barack Obama's re-election, citizens from 21 states have filed petitions asking to secede from the United States, according to the White House website.

Louisiana was first, posting its request on Nov. 7.

It was soon joined by Texas, on Nov. 9.

In asking for the president to "peacefully grant" permission for his state to withdraw from the union, creator Micah H., of Arlington, wrote: "To do so would protect its citizens' standard of living and re-secure their rights and liberties in accordance with the original ideas and beliefs of our founding fathers which are no longer being reflected by the federal government."

Petitioners have one month to obtain 25,000 signatures in order for the president to consider the request.

As of Monday morning, Louisiana had 13,197

Texas had 17,260.

The petition from Florida was created Saturday -- the same day the state finally declared Obama the victor in this election after another controversial ballot count. On Monday morning, it had 4,823 signatures.

The other 18 states with requests for secession: Alabama, North and South Carolina, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee, Michigan, Indiana, North Dakota, Montana, Colorado, Oregon, New Jersey, New York, Arkansas, Georgia and Missouri.

All quote a passage from the Declaration of Independence that reads "whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and institute new Government."

why Obama wants to be the leader of these idiots is beyond me.

[Park Life 71]

Obama's healthcare reforms effectively deliver a large part of the population from the dubious "freedom" to worry about who will cover their illnesses. Being able to take basic healthcare for granted, to count on it like one counts on water or electricity without worrying about choosing the supplier, means people simply gain more time and energy to dedicate their lives to other things. The lesson to be learned is that freedom of choice only functions if a complex network of legal, educational, ethical, economic and other conditions is present as the invisible background to the exercise of our freedom. This is why, as a counter to the ideology of choice, countries like Norway should be held up as models: although all the main agents respect a basic social agreement and large social projects are enacted in a spirit of solidarity, social productivity and dynamism are at extraordinary levels, contradicting the common wisdom that such a society should be stagnating."

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/13/obama-ground-floor-thinking

 

Zizek on youtube is a cracking watch btw.

[ewerk 30295]

Bush 88

Clinton 92

Clinton 96

Bush 00

Bush 04

Obama 08

Obama 12

....

Bush (Jeb) 16

Clinton (Hilary) 20

Obama (Michelle) 24

 

You can easily see 40 years of US rule under 3 families.

 

Term limits ensure democracy, Yay!

 

 

Hilary's time has gone. She'll be 73 come the 2021 inauguration which pretty much puts her out of that election and more than likely the one before it.

[Happy Face 29]

Chelsea?

[ewerk 30295]

Well she is more photogenic than she used to be.

[tooner 243]

compared to her mom maybe, still doesn't make her photogenic though.

[Happy Face 29]

 

Hastings tearing new arseholes on Piers Morgan

 

[Park Life 71]

In Italy he'd run for president and win, such would be the tailwind of the scandal.

[Happy Face 29]

The Lives of Others

 

One random lass (friend of Patreus) gets some anonymous emails telling her she's a bitch. Nowt threatening or owt.

 

She asks a mate at the FBI what the crack is.

 

Without a warrant or any evidence of illegality the FBI launch an investigation, determine which computer the nasty mails came from, and which other email accounts use that computer. Turns out to be another associate of Patreus.

 

FBI then check all of the mails on those accounts and also pull thirty thousand pages of communications from the original random lass to another General (Allen).

 

Now they're in the shit.

 

It's not a kiss and tell story. It's a Stasi story.

 

 

It's as bad in the UK too. 2007 report....

 

United Kingdom

World leading surveillance schemes

Lack of accountability and data breach disclosure law

Commissioner has few powers

Interception of communications is authorised by politician, evidence not used in court, and oversight is by commissioner who reports only once a year upon reviewing a subset of applications

Hundreds of thousands of requests from government agencies to telecommunications providers for traffic data

Data retention scheme took a significant step forward with the quiet changes based on EU law

Plans are emerging regarding surveillance of communications networks for the protection of copyrighted content

Despite data breaches, 'joined-up government' initiatives continue

Identity scheme still planned to be the most invasive in the world, highly centralised and biometrics-driven; plan to issue all foreigners with cards in 2008 are continuing

E-borders plans include increased data collection on travellers

 

England & Wales

Inherited constitutional and statutory protections from UK Government and many of the policies

National policies are not judged, e.g. Communications surveillance, border and trans-border issues

Councils continue to spread surveillance policies, including RFID, CCTV, ID and data sharing, road user tracking

Few democratic safeguards at local government level, even though local government may be more accountable to electorate because of smaller numbers, decisions do not appear to be informed by research, prototyping

 

 

https://www.privacyi...ountry-rankings

[PaddockLad 17111]

Its a fit up...somone in the FBI/homeland sec/Penatgaon etc wanted rid of Patreus from the FBI and set a honey with the worlds sexiest (to a 60 year old 4 star General) woman. Others have been dragged into it. If you dont want your work emails investigated without so much as a by-your-leave then I'd avoid working for the FBI.

[Happy Face 29]

No-one that had their emails investigated works for the FBI

 

Neither did anyone in the military.

 

It was a party organiser and a journo.

[PaddockLad 17111]

No-one that had their emails investigated works for the FBI

 

Neither did anyone in the military.

 

It was a party organiser and a journo.

 

I've got hold of the wrong end of the stick...the "random lass" was an unpaid social organiser for the US military at a base where Patreus has an office. Hardly random though. She was in Patreus's web and went to the FBI of her own free will when she started getting these emails. What the fuck did she expect

[Happy Face 29]

I've got hold of the wrong end of the stick...the "random lass" was an unpaid social organiser for the US military at a base where Patreus has an office. Hardly random though. She was in Patreus's web and went to the FBI of her own free will when she started getting these emails. What the fuck did she expect

 

By random, I meant she wasn't under any suspicion, and nothing in the emails contained anything to worry the FBI. There was no indication in those original mails of any wrongdoing that required federal investigations, certainly not related to Patreus or to Allen...or to any military offiocial.....

 

The messages were instead what the source terms “kind of cat-fight stuff.”

 

“More like, ‘Who do you think you are? … You parade around the base … You need to take it down a notch,’” according to the source, who was until recently at the highest levels of the intelligence community and prefers not to be identified by name.

 

The base described is MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, where Kelley serves as an unpaid “social liaison.” The source reports that the emails did make one reference to Gen. David Petraeus, but it was oblique and offered no manifest suggestion of a personal relationship or even that he was central to the sender’s spite.

 

Kelley herself seemed mystified as to what was behind the emails, much less who sent them.

 

“I don’t know who this person is and I don’t want to keep getting them,” she told the FBI, as recounted by the source.

 

When the FBI friend showed the emails to the cyber squad in the Tampa field office, her fellow agents noted that the absence of any overt threats.

 

“No, ‘I’ll kill you’ or ‘I'll burn your house down,’” the source says. “It doesn’t seem really that bad.”

 

The squad was not even sure the case was worth pursuing, the source says.

 

“What does this mean? There’s no threat there. This is against the law?” the agents asked themselves by the source’s account.

 

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/11/12/exclusive-paula-broadwell-s-emails-revealed.html

 

But they still went on to pull thousands of pages of communications and pore over every word of them?

 

Clearly exposes the lie that these new measures are only being used against "terror suspects".

[PaddockLad 17111]

If, as you point out, this isnt a "kiss and tell", do you think theres a possiblity that Paula Broadwell was put up to all this by someone who wanted out of the way?..."go in there and stir some shit up, lets see the what the fallout is"

 

Broadwell is ex West Point,an ex regular army and reserve army intelligence corp Lietenant Colonel...I dont think its beyond the realms of possiblity that shes been sent in there by others. And if it means turning over some cling-on's email account to accomplish what they set out to do, what the fuck does that matter to them? And reading that snippet youve posted, if this person at the FBI was such a good friend, how come Kelley's emails were ripped to shred's by her alleged friend's colleague's and/or superior's?...why did the friend share them around the office?

[Happy Face 29]

I considered the Wolfy angle on it, that it's been a tightly choreographed manoeuvre to shift some commanders who were getting on Obama's tits, but I'm more inclined to believe it's the surveillance state spiralled out of the control of those in power, hopefully such that they might introduce some barriers on it in future.

[ChezGiven 0]

I considered the Wolfy angle on it, that it's been a tightly choreographed manoeuvre to shift some commanders who were getting on Obama's tits, but I'm more inclined to believe it's the surveillance state spiralled out of the control of those in power, hopefully such that they might introduce some barriers on it in future.

I sensed the tension in this issue from you, it must be difficult to reconcile the Petraeus narrative with the one where Obama personally sets off drone attacks, shoots insurgents and locks up terrorists.

[Alex 34876]

Does any fucker know what these two are on about btw?