From GOPUSA, with the help of an Israeli Middle East expert the following report.
A Middle East expert is confident the Obama administration will cave to Iranian demands and allow the rogue state to keep its nuclear program.
Last week The Associated Press confirmed the existence of a "dear Ayatollah" letter written by President Obama to Iran's Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, urging cooperation in the fight against ISIS and tying cooperation on that front to a deal over Iran's nuclear program. The U.S., Iran, and other negotiators are facing a November 24 deadline for such a deal – a deal about which some Capitol Hill lawmakers have expressed doubts.
David Rubin, a former mayor of the Israeli city of Shiloh, spoke with OneNewsNow about the confirmed behind-the-scenes negotiations. Rubin says the Iranians appear confident that Obama is a weak president and will do whatever it takes to make a deal with Tehran.
"They're very clear that they think that there's going to be a deal with the United States because the Obama administration is very, very eager for a deal because they have to show some sort of accomplishment in place of all the weakness," he offers.
In Rubin's eyes, the Iranians are issuing dictates to the United States making it clear that they want their nuclear program to go forward.
"That is what the Iranians are saying – and I predict that that is going to be the result of these negotiations," he says. "There will be an agreement; there will be some token limitations. But the Iranians will be able to go forward with their nuclear programs."
As we anxiously await to observe how this obviously biased and somewhat questionable prediction stacks up against reality.
It's over; the only thing left to do is vote. Last night, Governor Romney and President Obama engaged in their final debate.
The general tide supports that Obama edged out Romney by a small margin. My favorite guru, Nate Silver over at the 538 Blog says that the debate is unlikely to provide Obama with a large bump but that a small bump will still be significant. I can't read the rest of the article because the blog is on the New York Times site and I've used up my 10 free articles for this month. If I want to read more articles, I have to be a paid subscriber or just wait to November for my next 10 free reads.
The debates were about as substantive as the "reality" shows that abound on the major networks. The moderators fail to ask substantive questions about matters such as climate change, the impact of the European economy on America, alternatives to fossil fuels and so on and so forth, and the candidates don't care if they answer the questions that are asked, only that they make points that their supporters will applaud.
The public plays a major role in this pretense of doing something meaningful. Far too many people have the attention span of a toddler and only wake up and focus when there is a zinger offered by one of the participants. The media actually writes reviews of the debates analyzing who gave the best zingers of the night. The President appears to have won the zinger contest in last night's debate with his reminder to Romney that the modern Navy is not just a bunch of ships but consists of aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines. Of course the memorable part of the chastisement was, "Governor,...we also have fewer horses and bayonets..."
The Huffington Post thinks that the President's zingers were "sharp but snarky." (Hunter Stuart and Oliver Noble) Various critics declared the President the loser of the first debate, chastising him for not offering any zingers. The talking heads on Good Morning America offered that the attack mode of the President in the last two debates may have upset women voters. Didn't bother me, but then I've watched Liam Neeson kick butt in Taken three times.
It would be nice if candidates could have real debates where they talked about the issues. Imagine scoring points with viewers by actually saying something substantive that required you to listen and follow the intricacies of the discussion. Everyone glued to the screen and not a single soul texting or playing Words with Friends on their electronic gadget of the moment.
I also hope for world peace. I'm a patron of impossible causes.
I support President Obama. I believe that he does think about matters of substance but realized that his initial efforts to engage in civil and substantive discourse wasn't playing well with Mr. and Ms. Average American. I enjoyed his zingers, but that's not why I am voting for him.
I'm casting my vote for Obama because I believe that this country needs a leader who thinks about what matters. A leader who is focused on our interaction with the rest of the world, who understands that foreign policy is not about threats and waving a big stick. I want a leader who believes that we are all in this together and supports domestic policies that address wealth distribution. You see, I don't believe that poverty is inevitable, that people are homeless because they are too lazy to do better, or that any child should go to bed hungry. I also believe that we can do better as a country, that we can work to build a society based on equity and fairness for all. I'm voting for Obama because in spite of the absence of any discussion of environmental issues in the debates, the President has demonstrated in practice and policies that environmental protection issues are high on his agenda.
Maybe next election cycle, we'll hear candidates engage in substantive discussions of the issues that should concern us all and maybe Denzel Washington will call me to chat. I work at being an optimist.
Romney: Full of sound and fury and saying nothing of substance. The first presidential debate focused on policy, not zingers to provide fodder for tomorrow's headlines. There were big, significant topics--entitlements, taxes and spending, the deficit, and education. I wasn't enthused about Obama's performance but I didn't find his answers rambling as some are proclaiming; he actually said what he would do and why. Romney spoke in negatives. He stated what he was not going to do but never said what he was going to do. For example he insisted that his proposed tax cut will not add to the deficit; however he never explained how a 20% reduction in each marginal tax rate, across the board, could be implemented without adding to the deficit Such a tax cut would result in a significant reduction in revenues and Romney's proposed tax plan also includes a $3 trillion increase in military spending, an increase that the military has not requested A decrease in revenues and an increase in expenditures don't add up to no increase in the deficit or as the President said, "It's math, It's arithmetic." By the way, the President directly challenged Romney's assertions in clear, concise language:
"The fact is that if you are lowering the rates the way you described, governor, then it is not possible to come up with enough deductions and loopholes that only affect high-income individuals to avoid either raising the deficit or burdening the middle class," Obama said. "It's math. It's arithmetic."--Obama
I found it interesting that Romney's style was to claim agreement with Obama's policy on some key issues. Romney declares that he agrees that the financial industry needs regulation but wants to promote his own plan and wants to repeal the Dodd-Frank regulatory act. He alleges that he supports the version of Obamacare that he engineered as governor but finds fault with how Obama didn't obtain any consensus and shoved health care reform down our throats. He insists that he agrees that public education must be a key focus. The question, which the President did raise, is why is Romney keeping the details of his alternative plans on these major issues secret? Are they too good to be true? I don't think that the President hit a homer but neither do I think that Romney won. I'd call it a tie. Romney essentially said nothing except to parrot vague generalities about the need to get the country back on track with no specifics as to how he plans to do that. President Obama didn't go for the jugular. It's not the man's style and frankly I think that his approach is more effective in the long run. Attack and confrontation provide temporary satisfaction but folks eventually stop listening to someone who shouts a lot. It's one debate. I'm not ready to dismiss Obama as ineffective. In 2008, he didn't walk to the same drummer as most presidential candidates. The odds were against him getting the nomination. He didn't shout and confrontation was not his style. He was measured and detailed in presenting his platform. Why would you expect this man to morph into the Godfather? I'm not certain as to why, but this president is often judged based more on who his followers want him to be rather than who he really is.
I was just getting ready for bed to nurse a bug when this caught my attention (a H/T to Echidne for posting this earlier):
The interviewer, Barbara West, must be a Freeper for the McCain campaign, and her questions are so obviously hostile they border on parody. Here are some background statistics before I continue this rant:
Federal deficit (Carter years): $54.5 billion annual average Federal deficit (Reagan years): $210.6 billion annual average
Federal budget (Carter administration): $590.9 billion (1980) Federal budget (Reagan administration): $1.14 trillion (1988-89)
National debt as a percentage of GNP (Carter years): 31.5% National debt as a percentage of GNP (Reagan years): 70%
Furthermore, it should be noted that the federal bureaucracy grew by 5% during the Reagan administration despite campaign promises and years of rhetoric about shrinking the size of government. But wait, there’s more:
Personal savings rate (Post WW-II to 1979): 8 to 10% of disposable income
Personal savings rate (1985): Zero.
(Since Bush #43, household debt now exceeds household income.)
My point: The current economic meltdown has roots going back to the Reagan administration, and the Republican mantra for almost 30 years has been “smaller government” and “fiscal responsibility” that, hypocritically, was never put into practice until ... you guessed it … Bill Clinton, a Democrat, who was the first president to actually balance the federal books.
Now the Republicans are trying to demonize Obama as a socialist. It is an outrageous lie when one considers that 20 years of Republican mismanagement set the stage for the current meltdown. Wish the kids a Happy Halloween for me.
Maybe we shouldn't have been wasting our time last night, listening to McCain and Obama accusing each other of being big spenders when we should have gone straight to the one expert who seems to agree with John's tax proposal. I don't mean some PhD economist or tax law expert or even a CPA; I'm talking of course, about Joe the Plumber, the fellow whose concerns about Obama's tax proposal has made him one of the most well known men -- and certainly the best known plumber on the planet at the moment. If that notoriety alone doesn't translate into financial success for Joe, it will be only because he'd rather not be in a higher tax bracket.
According to Joe Wurtzelberger, a progressive tax structure is Robin Hood socialism and John McCain seems to agree. I particularly liked his oily sneer when he repeated his "spread the wealth around" formula, but I wonder how that meshes with the spreading around of wealth inherent in supply side economics. It's only the direction of the trickle that differs after all, not the redistribution.
Of course Joe seems to have misunderstand what the differences are, and who can blame him? Like all of us he's been bombarded with ugly stereotypes of tax and spend liberals all his life and to be fair, it's complicated, but Joe is wrong. If he buys a business that grosses more than $250,000, he will not be propelled into a higher tax bracket by that fact alone. Surely Joe understands the difference between gross and net and knows about all the expenses and other deductions available. It's very unlikely that the business would net that much and therefore be subject to a tax increase of any kind. It's not very nice of his "Buddy" John not to have explained that to his "best buddy."
For one thing Obama's plan offers additional benefits like a tax credit for new employees and the elimination of Capital Gains for small businesses. Even if the business is wildly successful, and with all this notoriety, it may well be, the increase would be 3%. He would be better off in Obama's America than he would have been in Ronald Reagan's or John McCain's.
Very much to Mr. Wurtzelbacher's credit, he's not endorsing anyone yet. After all, his future and my future depend on a lot more than a 3% potential tax hike that's very unlikely to affect him. A new and deep recession may make it all moot if McCain's leadership is not much better than George Bush's.
All in all, the scenario is not what Joe fears it would be, it is not what John McCain misrepresents it to be and it's very very far from anything one could honestly describe as "spreading the wealth around" even if it's said without the squint and sneer and rubbing of hands. But then we're talking about John McCain's claims about his tax policy and not about honesty and to quote another plumber and funny guy I used to know - that shit don't flush.
Ahh, the pleasures of a sunken wreck, where hidden crannies are made for sulking, and long-abandoned galleys are still stocked with un-salvaged wine to challenge the jar-opening skills of an octopus. There is nothing like a good shipwreck to soothe a savage cephalopod.
Your faithful mudsquiggle has returned! No more self-flagellation (and don’t ask where the sucker-shaped hickeys come from). I don’t care if my earlier posts were riddled with specious reasoning and ad hominid attacks on hopeless humanoids. I tried to play fair … but the McHacks are back again … so I changed my mind. According to rumor, Senator John McCain intends to raise the Ayers issue during the next and last presidential debate.
Obama is associated with Bill Ayers, a man whose terrorist group killed police officers and bombed the U.S. Capital …
But wasn’t Obama eight years old when this Ayers fellow started the Weather Underground? If Obama spilled a glass of milk at age eight, not even General Ripper would give a rap about losing precious vital bodily fluids. But Senator McCain does. And who exactly is this Ayers fellow? According to the New York Times:
“Since earning a doctorate in education at Columbia in 1987, Mr. Ayers has been a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the author or editor of 15 books, and an advocate of school reform. “He’s done a lot of good in this city and nationally,” Mayor Richard M. Daley said in an interview this week, explaining that he has long consulted Mr. Ayers on school issues … “This is 2008,” Mr. Daley said. “People make mistakes. You judge a person by his whole life.”
And this is what Tom Hayden, the former 1960s activist, thinks about the Obama-Ayers connection:
[Hayden] said he saw attempts to link Mr. Obama with bombings and radicalism as “typical campaign shenanigans.” “If Barack Obama says he’s willing to talk to foreign leaders without preconditions,” Mr. Hayden said, “I can imagine he’d be willing to talk to Bill Ayers about schools. But I think that’s about as far as their relationship goes.”
So Barack Obama and William Ayers crossed paths and served on the same education board, while swarming wingnuts are making a big buzz over little more than a casual association. More than a buzz, the McCain/Palin campaign is using the Ayers trope to turn political rallies into ugly mob scenes with chants of “terrorist,” "traitor,” "kill him” and “off with his head.” In the year 2008, it is hard to believe there are still people acting like this:
Can you name even ONE wingnut who understands this as inciting mob violence? Can you name even ONE wingnut who has spoken out?
Of course, wingnuts conveniently ignore all evidence they find unsuitable to their cause, especially the language of hate when it benefits their candidate. Incitements to violence may not bother them, but they bother me. Angry mob scenes remind me of witch burnings, lynchings, pogroms, and 1930s Germany.
Amazing. Wingnuts have even ignored the pleas of their own candidate. Here is McCain trying to undo the damage of his own campaign run amuck:
But here is the rub. About the McCain supporter who called Obama an “Arab,” she was later interviewed via streaming cell phone by Noah Kunin from The UpTake, Adam Aigner of NBC News, and Dana Bash of CNN:
According to the transcript, the McCain supporter who called Obama an “Arab” got this information from a pamphlet supplied by her local McCain campaign office [my bold]. The implications are disturbing. When will candidate McCain fess up and take responsibility for the worst assault on civil discourse in American history? When will he finally admit to crossing the line and inciting mob violence? How does one equate “Country First” with outright lying?
In this world, there is hardly one politician untouched by six degrees of separation. Somewhere, there will always be a questionable association - whether real or imagined. While the McCain-Palin campaign points a finger at Barack Obama, there are more than enough skeletons in McCain's closet to delight Wes Craven. These include Randy Scheunemann, G. Gordon Liddy, Charles Keating, former Senator Phil Gramm, and dozens of lobbyists and other shady characters too numerous to mention.
But wingnuts will read only what they want to read, hear only what they want to hear, and believe only what they want to believe because their minds are tighter than clams, and they are incapable of acquiring new knowledge or considering other viewpoints.
I grow tired of this post now. Maybe I'll talk about these shady characters some other time. Meanwhile, your faithful, blue-blooded octopus is hungry. Is that a tasty McMorsal I see crawling furtive under anemones?
According to Raw Story, Mark Salter, a top McCain aide, told the Wall Street Journal last Friday that the campaign was tired of "catching the spears." That's right, he called Obama a spear-chucker.
The "spears" of course were allegations of McCain's unsavory connections with unsavory people, enough of which are sufficiently beyond question that the McCain campaign needs to invoke the victim image again in order to distract from the lobbyist crew that run the McCain/Palin Cirque de Sleazy.
The plan is to go negative, and this from a campaign Karl Rove thought was too negative already! This from the Swift Boat Party, the party who dragged McCain's baby daughter through the racist mud: the party that regularly paints war heroes as malingerers and familiars of bin Laden.
I really can't wait to see them resurrect the Pastor Wright controversy against the background of Sarah Palin's witch hunting "spiritual" leader. So far they have been rather successful in convincing us that McCain was exonerated in the Keating affair (he was censured for bad judgment) and in tap dancing around the information that despite his phony anti-lobbyist rhetoric, his top aides were lobbyists for Burma, various African dictators, oil tyrants and child enslavers, but the Clean John image is too flimsy to hold up for long.
I have a feeling that the mud slinging will backfire with all but his most psychotic admirers, but for connoisseurs of hypocrisy it's going to be quite a show anyway.
