Category Archives: Politics – international

The media enablers of the worst president in history

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The Diplomad has an excellent post today that recognises both the extraordinary incompetence of the Obama administration and couples this with the American media who are to a large extent responsible for the dismal state of both the economy and the foreign relations by not reporting what they clearly and perfectly well know themselves. Obama is their man and regardless of the harm he does, they will never allow it to be said that their judgment was in any way impaired in backing him to the hilt. The title of the post is The Media and Obama: Hitting The Disgust Quota. This is just one of the paras in what is a post to be read from end to end:

Everywhere else one looks abroad one sees the consequences of this misadministration’s incompetence, delusions, and anti-Americanism. They turned victory in Iraq into defeat: Iran is now the predominant player in Iraq. They have done the same in Afghanistan, allowing the Taliban and AQ to reappear after the decisive defeat administered them. In Egypt, they sold out Mubarak, and got in exchange the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim world openly ridicules and attacks us. Israel increasingly fears for its survival as Obama refuses to stand up to Iran’s mad pretensions. Obama has betrayed Poland and actively sought to undermine the UK in its confrontation with the Argentines over the Falklands. In Asia, the misadministration’s fecklessness re Russia and China is having serious consequences for the global economy and for key US interests and allies in the region. The insane Communist monarchy in North Korea grows evermore aggressive and dismissive of the United States. In this hemisphere, we see a deliberate stiffing of our Canadian friends, and a policy of drift and disengagement that alienates allies such as Chile and Colombia, allows autocrats such as Chavez, Ortega, Correa, Morales, and Castro a free hand, encourages clowns such as Argentina’s Cristina Fernandez to drive her economy into the ground, and has turned the OAS into an anti-American sounding board. The one effective policy the misadministration had in Latin America was the selling of guns to drug cartels.

He also covers domestic policy along the same lines. Meanwhile today Dick Cheney is quoted as saying:

I think our friends no longer count on us, no longer trust us and our adversaries don’t fear us.

But it’s the media. No Republican could survive this level of incompetence and damage without an end-to-end banshee wail from the media. That they don’t even tap him on the wrist is where the disgust really lies. Even Obama would be better if he had even a small measure of the criticisms he deserves but he receives virtually none at all.

Calling Dr Cool

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Mark Steyn at the end of a posted note on Obama and the American health care system:

Perhaps things will get so bad the coolest president ever will no longer seem quite so hip. But, alas, you’ll have to wait three years for a hip replacement. That’s government health care for you.

I’m sorry to give you the punch line first but it’s all pretty funny in a blackly humorous sort of way. It would probably be less funny if it were happening to you.

The Obama legacy

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Nothing like self interest to wake people up. Many a disaster in the Obama maladministration but they are either remote in place or in time. Debt levels and the deficit, Benghazi and the all round mishandling of foreign relations in the Middle East, the NSA, the IRS. All water off a duck’s back for the Obama constituency. But with the Affordable Care Act, now that’s getting close to the bone. Now people are paying attention and they will pay more attention as time goes by and their access to medical care disintegrates. From Drudge.

More states warn against Obamacare fraud…
SICK: Seniors lose their doctors…
‘Glitches’ hit paper, phone applications too…
Zero enrollments in Oregon…
Premiums double in Wisconsin…
School District Hit with $6M in New Costs…
10 Senate Dems demand delay…
PROPOSED LAW: ‘If You Like Your Health Plan, You Can Keep It Act’…

So far as the Obama legacy goes, this is it and it is a perfect fit.

The scandals just keep on coming

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The top story at Drudge:

NSA monitored calls of 35 world leaders after US official handed over contacts

• Agency given more than 200 numbers by government official
• NSA encourages departments to share their ‘Rolodexes’
• Surveillance produced ‘little intelligence’, memo acknowledges

I wonder if it’s the top story at The New York Times.

It will, of course, be disappointing for Kevin if he’s not amongst the 35.

UPDATE: And now the top story at Drudge: Germany, Brazil Turn to UN to Restrain American Spies:

Brazil and Germany today joined forces to press for the adoption of a U.N. General Resolution that promotes the right of privacy on the internet, marking the first major international effort to restrain the National Security Agency’s intrusions into the online communications of foreigners, according to diplomatic sources familiar with the push.

It was all well and good when we were on the same side, but now is different.

Obama and the Middle East

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If you’ve been reading every email and listening to every mobile conversation of every journalist in the United States you are sure to have a very docile press corps. And a very docile press corps it is indeed. Take the latest news about foreign policy and the Saudis which is an exceptionally quiet story for an event this momentous. But we do have some analysis for what it’s worth. Like this:

What should worry the Obama administration is that Saudi concern about U.S. policy in the Middle East is shared by the four other traditional U.S. allies in the region: Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Israel. They argue (mostly privately) that Obama has shredded U.S. influence by dumping President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, backing the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi, opposing the coup that toppled Morsi, vacillating in its Syria policy, and now embarking on negotiations with Iran — all without consulting close Arab allies. . . .

The problem was clear in the fall of 2011, when I was told by Saudi officials in Riyadh that they increasingly regarded the U.S. as unreliable and would look elsewhere for their security. Obama’s reaction to these reports was to be peeved that the Saudis didn’t recognize all that the U.S. was doing to help their security, behind the scenes. The president was right on the facts but wrong on the atmospherics. [My bolding]

Obama was “peeved” was he? Not appreciated enough, was he? And as far as “the facts” go, the first of the paras quoted ought to be facts enough for anyone, so which are the “facts” that the President was so right on? It’s nothing to do with “atmospherics” and everything to do with national security. On present form you would be crazy to trust Obama and the US unless you were some radical fringe group out to destabilise your community. That the journalist sides with Obama is just par for the course. Which brings me to the second foreign policy story of the day.

Someone at the State Department was fired this week who had apparently been secretly tweeting national security information under a false name. In his tweets a top Obama official had been specifically named as having released top secret information to the world at large. From the story:

Jofi Joseph, the National Security Council official fired last week for Tweeting secretly under the moniker @natsecwonk, had publicly, albeit anonymously, accused a senior White House official of leaking classified information related to United States intelligence operations against Iran.

Joseph, who was outed in a report Tuesday in The Daily Beast, criticized and insulted dozens of Obama administration officials, lawmakers, Capitol Hill staffers, and journalists during his two-year stint on social media. But his number-one target was Deputy National Security Advisor for Communications Ben Rhodes, a senior official close to President Obama. Rhodes worked for the same department as Joseph, albeit at a much higher level.

In the summer of 2012, Joseph issued multiple tweets under his @natsecwonk account suggesting that Rhodes was the source of classified information leaked to the press about the Stuxnet virus, a joint U.S.-Israeli cyber warfare effort to sabotage Iran’s nuclear centrifuge program. Joseph, as an official in the non-proliferation bureau of the State Department and later inside the White House, was part of the administration’s team working on the Iranian nuclear issue.

Well, of course the whistleblower has lost his job and Rhodes, like Alger Hiss before him, has been exonerated at the highest levels. But someone has been leaking the Stuxnet information and if not him then someone. That the Saudis, Israelis, Jordanians and the Emirates show a lack of trust in Obama has hardly come from nowhere. Everybody is looking for new partners because relying on the US may no longer be part of anyone’s long game going forward. Which brings me to this, Quietly, Israel and the Gulf States Draw Closer Together:

A clear distinction is made by the Saudis between the world of ideology/media/culture and the realm of raison d’etat. Hence, there is no reason to think they would not be able to publicly vilify Israel, while maintaining off the radar links with it against more immediate enemies.

In this regard, it is worth remembering the Wikileaks revelation of remarks made in private by Saudi King Abdullah to American General David Petraeus in April, 2008, in which he recommended military action against the Iranian nuclear program. The king referred to Iran as the “head of the snake,” which should be cut off. No similarly venomous remarks on Israel were quoted from the conversation, which took place far from the public eye.

Of course the common interests only go so far. Saudi Arabia supports Salafi Islamist forces in both Syria and Egypt. Saudi money finds its way to Salafi elements among the Palestinians. But the areas of commonality are on issues of cardinal importance to both countries.

The de facto, unseen alliance between Israel, Saudi Arabia and the GCC countries is one of the most intriguing structures currently emerging amid the whirling chaos of the Middle East.

Chaos, all right, direct to you from the same people who brought Obamacare to the health care system in the US.

Someone’s reading my emails

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I am doing a presentation on Tuesday next week and wrote the following note to the coordinator of the seminar:

This is the paper I will speak to which is an update on my previously published paper. I cannot believe how much things have evolved from then. I will also do a set of overheads which will help me keep track of where I am and might even be of use to those who come to listen.

Attached to it was my paper named nowhere other than in the paper itself:

The Use of Multiple Choice Questions with Explanations for Economic Assessment

This was the same title for a paper I had written in 2008 and put up on an academic website along with an abstract. But for the past five years the paper had simply been a paper that could be accessed but no one had. And then, a few hours after sending my note off to the coordinator of the seminar I received the following email:

Hi Professor Kates,

Hope you are doing well.

I would like to introduce myself as [redacted], one of the fastest growing research acceleration firm. We have been working with academicians from 35 of the top 100 universities across the globe including researchers from Harvard, Wharton, Stanford, MIT, NUS, and INSEAD.

We help researchers with Data Harvesting, Analytics, Visualization and Technology Implementation. As an organization, our primary focus is to increase research productivity, reduce research costs, and enable researchers focus on the most important facets of their research. You can read more about us here .

As we read through the abstract of research paper on The Use of Multiple Choice Questions with Explanations for Economic Assessment, we thought it would be a good idea to set up some time for a short call and explore how we can help you accelerate your research. Let me know a good time and we can schedule a call accordingly. I look foward to hearing from you.

Regards

I do not believe in coincidences, specially not one in a million shots like this would have been. This was, moreover, not just someone who had read my email but had been able to open my attachment, read its title and presumably anything else they chose to read, and then send me a follow up email, all on the same day.

It’s not just the NSA and it’s not just our foreign enemies. My google account information is not just being shared but my attachments can be opened by total strangers. And the more I think about it, the more it burns me up.

UPDATE: I have just noticed that there was the following next to the email address of the sender which suggests some suspicion by gmail about the way this note was generated:

via m3kw2wvrgufz5godrsrytgd7.apphosting.bounces.google.com

Clicking on “via” led to this:

Why am I seeing extra information next to the sender’s name?

Gmail believes that by adding more information about the origin of a message, you can be better informed about who sent the message and can avoid confusion. For example, if someone fakes a message from a sender that you trust, like your bank, you can use this information to see that the message is not really from your trusted sender. The information that we use to display this information is included in the message headers but these headers can be hard to understand. Gmail analyzes this information and displays it in a simple to read format.

Why am I seeing an email address next to the sender’s name?

If the sender’s full email address is displayed, then Gmail thinks that you have not communicated with this sender in the past. If the email address is quite long, we’ll show you a shortened version.

Once Gmail concludes that you communicate with this sender (for example, if you reply to emails from this sender, or if you add this sender to your address book) we’ll stop displaying their address next to their name.

Why am I seeing “via” followed by a domain name next to the sender’s name?

Gmail detected that the email was sent via another mail service. This means that the sender may be using a third-party email service to generate this message. For example, the message may have been sent through a social networking site which offers an email service or sent through a mailing list that you’re subscribed to.

Gmail displays this information because many of the services that send emails on behalf of others don’t verify that the name that the sender gives matches that email address. We want to protect you against misleading messages from people pretending to be someone you know.

How can I remove the extra information next to the sender’s name?

Once Gmail concludes that you communicate with this sender (for example, if you replied to emails from this sender, or if you add this sender to your address book) we’ll stop displaying the full email address.

However, if the sender sends the email through a third-party service or a mailing list we may continue to show ‘via’ followed by the service that sent the message.

I’m a sender and I don’t want my recipients to see the “via” link. What can I do?

Gmail checks whether emails are correctly authenticated. If your messages are sent by a bulk mailing vendor or by third-party affiliates, please publish an SPF record that includes the IPs of the vendor or affiliates which send your messages and sign your messages with a DKIM signature that is associated with your domain.

What do they all have in common?

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What’s the matter with these people? This is the new socialist America. The old America, the pre-Obama America, the America built on the free market and competition, that’s the old America. Here’s the way things are now. Poor people are as likely to get sick as rich people. People without jobs are as likely to get sick as people with jobs. Illegal migrants are as likely to get sick as citizens and legal migrants. So the rich, the working and the citizens should be made to pay for the health care of their opposites. And if the rich, the working, the locals and the legal must experience a downwards trajectory in their own level of healthcare to support the others, well that’s just how it has to be. And if the system doesn’t work, if health care deteriorates and it becomes impossible to see a doctor, well so what. Obama never promised you competence, honesty, sound policy and a better life. He promised you only equality, and that my friends, is exactly what you are going to get. Except for those well connected elites who will rise even higher on the backs of an increasingly desperate middle class.

Ignorance rules

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Government-run anything is a disaster waiting to happen, especially government-run governments. It is just that everyone seems to have to learn it for themselves. Our generation learned from watching the Soviet Union (what’s that? say all the under-40s). Now they have to learn it from their own soviet-type leaders, as with the Affordable Care Act in the US. This is taken directly off the Instapundit page as printed. Hilarious for the rest of the world; insanity for the US.

OCTOBER 21, 2013
BYRON YORK: President leads a surreal pep rally for ailing Obamacare.

There was a lot of speculation about what President Obama would say when he made his first extended remarks about problems with the Affordable Care Act. Would he apologize? Would he crack the whip on his own administration, pledging that no more mistakes would be tolerated? Would he attempt to deflect blame to the Republicans who have long opposed Obamacare?

What few observers expected, given the ongoing failure of the Obamacare exchanges, was that Obama would hold a pep rally for the troubled system. And yet that is what he did. . . .

The president made a few more brief mentions of Obamacare’s technical deficiencies during his 28-minute speech, but in the end his Rose Garden appearance bore a great resemblance to the campaign-style speeches he made selling the health plan when Congress was considering it back in 2009 and 2010. (Minus, of course, the now-discredited promise that anyone who has coverage and likes it can keep it under the new system.)

Nothing about the event seemed to go smoothly. For example, Obama said anyone having trouble with the Obamacare website could call an 800 number to apply for coverage. “You can get your questions answered by real people, 24 hours a day, in 150 different languages,” Obama said. But a short time later, the Washington Examiner’s Philip Klein tried the system and tweeted what he learned: “Can’t make this up. Got through to 800 number, followed prompts, and got referred to Healthcare.gov.”

Then there were the people Obama used as backdrops for his speech, people he said have “benefited from the Affordable Care Act already.” It turns out that was a stretch. One was a man who works in a Philadelphia restaurant, does not have health care through his employer, but has, according to a White House press handout, “recently used Healthcare.gov to process his application and is waiting for the options for potential plans.”

Another was a man just out of graduate school who has no health coverage but “is planning to enroll after he explores his coverage options on the D.C. exchange.” Yet another was a Tennessee small business owner who “was able to register through Healthcare.gov and now plans to comparison shop for the best plan that meets her budget and needs.”

As success stories go, they didn’t represent much success.

A short time after the president’s event, White House spokesman Jay Carney was either unable or unwilling to offer background on the website’s problems, on the testing that took place before the rollout, on the contractor involved, or on whether the administration will penalize Americans for not buying insurance when the website on which insurance is sold doesn’t work.

Talk about a bad day at the White House.

Even the traditional media are noticing.

And then immediately after – which means in time sequence, immediately before – we find this about the Canadian health care system.

OCTOBER 21, 2013
GOVERNMENT RUN HEALTH CARE: Surgery Caps In Canada:

“There’s even more demand and they’re cutting back,” he said, adding he doesn’t blame the hospital or the surgeon, opthalmologist Dr. Barry Emara. But he believes people who’ve paid taxes to the Ontario government all their lives should get prompt access to health care now they need it. “It’s like a car insurance company saying ‘We’ve had two many accidents this year, we’re cutting everyone off.’”

The problem, according to hospital CEO David Musyj, is that the number of procedures – when it comes to cataracts, hips replacements and knee replacements – is capped by the Health Ministry. And hospital officials (up until October, cataracts were done by Hotel-Dieu Grace Hospital, which has since transferred cataracts to Windsor Regional) were scheduling surgeries based on the previous year’s cap of 5, 022. Then in September, they learned the cap for the fiscal year that started April 1 would be 4,849. In 2010, there were 5,412 procedures, he said. In a guest column published in today’s Windsor Star, Musyj said the cuts are due to the continuing rise in health care costs and governments looking for ways to cope with them.

When the government runs health care, it gets worse, but more expensive. Kind of like health care websites. A move in the free-market direction would accomplish the opposite, but presents fewer opportunities for graft.

It’s bizarre how things can be ruined so quickly. No one any longer even knows how things work, specially the President of the United States and his Democrat allies. They have no idea like their Leninist friends and mentors.The damage they cause will be incredible.

Debt by the numbers

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deb and deficits in the us

I wonder if this is related to this: In 23 Advanced Economies: U.S. Adults Rank 21st in Math Skills. The inability to even be frightened by these numbers, by the size of the debt, by the impossibility of ever repaying this side of inflation even some remote part of the total, by the rate of its current growth, all of these suggest a deficiency amongst large proportions of the American voting public requires an explanation. A deficient understanding of maths is not all that far from a genuine possibility. The voting population in the United States is much degraded from the informed public that had once existed.

Australia, by the way, was 13th in math, almost dead on the international average and 4th in literacy. There is hope for us yet. But with the US, I cannot see what the answer is.

Monty Python and the US economy

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black knight republicans

Turns out I’m not the only one whose mind turned to this image this week. Here it is used to represent the supposed suicidal run at the American president over his Affordable Care Act. Charge of the Light Brigade kind of stuff, suicide mission and a rout.

Yet what’s a party going to do? If the only tactic is to stand still and be run over while the other side does what it wants, then do nothing and just get on with life. But if the aim is to try to avert a disaster, or at least to publicise that the aim is to avert a disaster, who is to say what is to be done?

The economics of the debt and deficits is pretty straightforward as is the likely disaster that is to follow the introduction of “Obamacare”. The politics, on the other hand, is a matter of political judgment of which most of the people who make it into Congress have at least some level of a proven expertise.

The problem of problems in the US remains the distortions created by the media. How to get any kind of non-Democrat message into the community is an unknown. The US is being ruined because there is no means to have conservative concerns widely discussed and treated with respect across most of the places in which the media might be expected to reach. The shutdown and the attempt to force a compromise was a tactic to try to achieve at least some kind of wider understanding that there are reasons for concern.

On the politics I remain agnostic and unsure but I am far from thinking it was a certain mistake.