Is Current Events dead?

[JACkory]

[JACkory]

[JACkory]

[Ayinger]

They're all dead. Massive roof collapse at a guitar convention in Montana. God rest Randy Meisner......

[JACkory]

Balloon boy is a hoax. Balloon man blew up in my hand.

[RocDoc]

Oct 16, 2009 11:11:19 GMT -5 Ayinger said:

They're all dead. Massive roof collapse at a guitar convention in Montana. God rest Randy Meisner......

shit!
i knew there musta been a good reason why jac was posting up those pictures...and on 'current events'.
coulda been 'gone but not forgotten'...but here it is.
cool.

that's really too bad. but why so little news coverage?

shows how out-of-style the eagles had fallen i suppose.

i guarantee ya one thing...holzman be DANCIN'!!

~

~

~

lol.

[RocDoc]

a-HA!

The Reality Moment

<sub>By DAVID BROOKS

Published: October 16, 2009

That which can’t continue doesn’t. A nation can spend and spend, pile debt upon debt, but eventually there comes a reality moment when some leader emerges to say enough is enough and when decent people, looking around at themselves and their own best nature, respond by demanding a return to responsibility.

In the United States, we’re not at that moment yet. Private debt is being replaced by public debt. New entitlements are being created, and the money that could be used to ward off fiscal disaster is being used for other things. Here, Democrats still get ahead by promising tax cuts for the bottom 98 percent and Republicans get ahead by promising tax cuts for all and Medicare cuts for none.

But Britain has hit its reality moment. The Brits are ahead of us when it comes to public indebtedness and national irresponsibility. Spending has been out of control for longer and in a more sustained way.

But in that country, the climate of opinion has turned. There, voters are ready for a politician willing to face reality. And George Osborne, who would become the chancellor of the Exchequer in the likely event that his Conservative Party wins the next election, has aggressively seized the moment.

In a party conference address earlier this month, Osborne gave the speech that an American politician will someday have to give. He said that he is not ideologically hostile to government. “Millions of Britons depend on public services and cannot opt out,” he declared. He defended government workers against those who would deride them as self-serving bureaucrats: “Conservatives should never use lazy rhetoric that belittles those who are employed by the government.”

But, he pivoted, “it is because we treat those who work in our public sector with respect that I want to be straight with you about the choices we face.” The British government needs to cut back.

Osborne declared that his government would raise the retirement age. That age was scheduled to rise at some point in the distant future. Osborne vowed to increase it sometime in the next five to 10 years.

Osborne declared that there would be no tax cuts any time soon. He said that as a matter of principle he believes that the top income tax rate of 50 percent is too high. But, he continued, “we cannot even think of abolishing the 50 percent rate in the rich” while others down the income scale are asked to scrimp.

Osborne offered government workers the same sort of choice that many private sector executives are forced to make. He proposed a public sector pay freeze in order to avoid 100,000 layoffs. He said that the pay freeze would apply to all workers except those making less than £18,000 (nearly $29,000) “because I don’t believe in balancing the budget on the backs of the poorest. Nor do you.”

There were other austerities. Osborne vowed to cut a program he once supported but which has not proved its worth: a baby bond program that was meant to help offset the costs of childhood. There would no longer be means-tested tax credits for families making more than £50,000.

Osborne’s speech was not an isolated event. The Conservatives have treated British voters as adults for a year now, with a string of serious economic positions. The Conservatives supported the Labour government bank bailout, even though it was against their political interest to do so. Last November, Osborne opposed a cut in the value-added taxes on the grounds that the cuts were unaffordable and would not produce growth. It is not easy for any conservative party to oppose tax cuts, but this one did it.

And the public has responded. The Conservatives now have a dominating lead over Labour. Over all, support for the Conservatives rose by 4 percentage points after Osborne’s speech. The polls reveal that nearly 60 percent of Britons support the austerity measures. The Conservatives have a 21-point lead when it comes to being honest about public finances and a 14-point lead on economic policy generally.

The key is that Osborne is not merely offering pain, but a different economic vision — different from Labour and different from the Thatcherism that was designed to meet the problems of the 1980s.

In the U.S., the economic crisis has caused many to question capitalism. But Britain has discredited the center-left agenda with its unrelenting public spending, its public development agencies and disappointing public-private investment partnerships.

Osborne and David Cameron, the party leader, argue that Labour’s decision to centralize power has undermined personal and social responsibility. They are offering a responsibility agenda from top to bottom. Decentralize power so local elected bodies have responsibility. Structure social support to encourage responsible behavior and responsible spending.

If any Republican is looking for a way forward, start by doing what they’re doing across the Atlantic.

A version of this article appeared in print on October 16, 2009, on page A27 of the New York edition.

www.nytimes.com/2009/10/16/opinion/16brooks.html?_r=1&em=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1255748407-x9bNCYmuWnshCpRSgxpx3A</sub>

as pantywaist liberals go, brooks is a class act at least 99% of the time...

[skvorecky]

You think the Democrats don't have their neo-liberal colonialism? Give me a break, dude. The whole system is busted as far as I'm concerned.

[RocDoc]

the beat goes on....

<sub>Opposition activist killed in southern Russia

By SHAMSUDIN BOKOV, Associated Press Writer –

Sun Oct 25, 3:25 pm ET

NAZRAN, Russia – A prominent opposition and rights activist in Russia's southern province of Ingushetia was shot dead Sunday in at least the third killing of a human rights defender in the volatile North Caucasus region in just over three months.

Maksharip Aushev worked to publicize human rights abuses and organize rallies against Ingushetia's deeply unpopular former president, Murat Zyazikov — activities which observers said made him powerful enemies.

Aushev died when several assailants sprayed his vehicle with automatic gunfire from a passing car. A woman traveling with him was badly wounded in the attack on a road in the neighboring province of Kabardino-Balkariya, police said.

Aushev's murder follows the killing in July of Natalya Estemirova, a prominent human rights activist who was found shot in Ingushetia after being kidnapped in Chechnya. And in August, Zarema Sadulayeva, a Chechen woman who helped injured children, and her husband were kidnapped and killed.

"Sadly, the new killing ... clearly shows an atmosphere of impunity in the North Caucasus," Tatyana Lokshina, deputy director of Human Rights Watch, said Sunday, according to the Interfax news agency. "Civil activities, human rights and opposition activities have virtually become a form of suicide."

Lokshina, who personally knew Aushev, said that he became involved in rights activities after his son and nephew were kidnapped in 2007. Aushev later got them released.

"He started working in human rights in Ingushetia and tried to combat abductions. He was a very brave man," Lokshina was quoted by Interfax as saying.

Aushev had worked with Magomed Yevloyev, a journalist, lawyer and opposition activist who was detained and killed by police in August 2008. Police said at the time that Yevloyev was shot and killed after he tried to grab a weapon from one of the officers.

Following Yevloyev's killing, Aushev for some time took over his Web site, which was critical of regional authorities and reported on abuses, abductions and killings plaguing the southern province.

Shortly after Yevloyev's death, the Kremlin dismissed Zyazikov, replacing him with Yunus-Bek Yevkurov. Yevkurov, a former military intelligence officer, has vowed to end abuses against civilians and quickly became popular in the region.

Yevkurov pushed for an investigation into Yevloyev's killing, and a court ruled last November that his detention by police was illegal.

Violence linked to Islamic militants has continued to plague the impoverished, mostly Muslim province. Yevkurov himself barely survived a suicide car bombing in June.

"This heinous crime was intended to destabilize the region," Yevkurov said in a statement. He praised Aushev and promised to do all he can to track down the killers.

Russia's Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika has taken the murder probe under his personal control, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.

Opposition and officials in Ingushetia wouldn't comment on possible reasons behind Aushev's killing.

Yulia Latynina, a commentator and author who has written extensively about the North Caucasus, told the Ekho Moskvy radio Sunday that Aushev could have been killed by people who were responsible for Yevloyev's death and sought to hamper the investigation into his killing.

Latynina said that some officers of the Federal Security Service, the main KGB successor agency, could have been interested in Aushev's killing, but added that their involvement appeared less likely.

Aushev said last month that agents had tried to abduct him last month when his vehicle was stopped for an ID check at a police checkpoint outside the provincial capital, but he managed to escape. He told Ekho Moskvy radio that the incident followed his meeting with top security officials in the region.

___

Associated Press Writer Sergei Venyavsky contributed to this report from Rostov-on-Don, Russia

news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091025/ap_on_re_eu/eu_russia_activist_killed_8</sub>


a classic case of an overestimation of the power of the 4th estate, eh?

well yes, once again....

in related news, every journalist's insurance rates in russia have double again.

[RocDoc]

Health care myths, both left and right

<sub>By Steve Chapman

October 25, 2009

If you've been following the health care debate over the last couple of years, you may have heard the grim tale of Nataline Sarkisyan. Just 17 years old, afflicted with leukemia, she needed a liver transplant, but the insurance company Cigna refused to cover the surgery. After being picketed by nurses and the family, the insurer relented, but too late: She died that same day.

When he ran for president, John Edwards used the girl's experience as proof of the need for reform. Her parents went to Cigna headquarters to charge the company with killing their daughter to make money. Lately, a liberal group called Americans United for Change has used her in a TV spot to dramatize its claim that "if insurance companies win, we lose."

Her case is an excellent illustration of what is wrong with our approach to health care -- but not how Cigna's critics mean. The insurer declined to pay for the transplant because, it said, "the treatment would be unproven and ineffective -- and therefore experimental and not covered."

Nataline's surgeons disagreed, estimating she had a 65 percent chance of surviving six months with a new liver. But Dr. Goran Klintmalm, head of the Baylor Regional Transplant Institute in Dallas, told The Los Angeles Times the surgery was "very high-risk" and "on the margins." Even on the best prognosis, she stood a one-in-three chance of dying -- after undergoing a very expensive operation and taking a liver that might otherwise have gone to someone with a better chance of survival.

Maybe Cigna was mistaken. Maybe not. The problem is that the critics seem to imagine that once we crack down on insurance companies or go to a single-payer government health insurance plan, future patients like Nataline will get anything their doctors recommend.

They won't. No matter how we "reform" health insurance, there will still be close calls, where it's not clear that a costly procedure will actually do any good. There will have to be someone, either in government or in the private sector, to decide which operations and treatments should be covered and which should not. And there will be patients who will die after being refused.

Health care "reform" won't eliminate such incidents and may produce more of them. Despite all those greedy private health insurers -- or maybe because of them -- Americans get far more liver transplants per capita than the residents of Canada, France or Britain.

But liberals are not the only people who fantasize that our health care resources are unlimited. Republicans have accused the Obama administration of plotting to set up "death panels" to ration care for seniors. Former Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey of New York called the House Democratic health care bill "a vicious assault on elderly people" that will "cut your life short."

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele has taken the same tack. After the administration proposed modest reductions in the growth of spending on Medicare, he did an impersonation of John Edwards.

"We want to make sure that we are not cutting the Medicare program," Steele said. "Anytime you get a body of individuals that go beyond me and my doctor who are going to make decisions about what kind of health care I get, that's rationing of health care." But as long as someone else has to pay for those decisions, someone other than doctors and patients is going to make decisions about what treatments are worth the cost.

As it happens, Washington is not about to get stingy with seniors. The cost constraints in the health care bills moving through Congress would trim total projected Medicare outlays by only 3 to 5 percent over the next decade. A cut of 5 percent in 2019 spending, however, would leave it 80 percent higher than this year.

Ten years from now, even with such "cuts," seniors will have more and better medical options than today. Yet Republicans act as though everyone over 65 will be herded onto an iceberg and pushed out to sea.

What left and right have in common is the delusion that when it comes to medicine, nothing succeeds like excess. But no health care measure can alter the fact that our resources are not unlimited. We may not want to hear it, but no matter what kind of insurance system you have, sometimes someone has to say "no."

Steve Chapman is a member of the Tribune's editorial board and blogs at chicagotribune.com/chapman

[e-mail]

www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-oped1025chapmanoct25,0,5406469.column</sub>

[RocDoc]

<sub>ONE MINUTE TO MIDNIGHT

Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War.

By Michael Dobbs.

Illustrated. 426 pp. Alfred. A. Knopf. $28.95.

www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/books/review/Holbrooke-t.html?pagewanted=2&_r=2</sub>

Real W.M.D.’s



<sub>By RICHARD HOLBROOKE

Published: June 22, 2008

Any new entry in the crowded field of books on the 1962 Cuban missile crisis must pass an immediate test: Is it just another recapitulation, or does it increase our net understanding of this seminal cold war event? By focusing on the activities of the American, Soviet and Cuban militaries during those tense October days, Michael Dobbs’s “One Minute to Midnight” passes this test with flying colors. The result is a book with sobering new information about the world’s only superpower nuclear confrontation — as well as contemporary relevance.


Dobbs, a reporter for The Washington Post, states his central thesis concisely in a description of the state of play on Oct. 25, the 10th day of the crisis: “The initial reactions of both leaders had been bellicose. Kennedy had favored an air strike; Khrushchev thought seriously about giving his commanders in Cuba authority to use nuclear weapons. After much agonizing, both were now determined to find a way out that would not involve armed conflict. The problem was that it was practically impossible for them to communicate frankly with one another. Each knew very little about the intentions and motivations of the other side, and tended to assume the worst. Messages took half a day to deliver. ... The question was no longer whether the leaders of the two superpowers wanted war — but whether they had the power to prevent it.”

Ten days earlier, a U-2 spy plane had produced photographic evidence that the Soviets were sneaking nuclear missiles into Cuba. In “High Noon in the Cold War,” published four years ago, Max Frankel described this reckless action as “worthy of the horse at Troy.” Within hours of the discovery, Kennedy made a decision: the United States would not tolerate the missiles remaining in Cuba. During the next week, a small group of officials who would go down in history as the Executive Committee, or ExComm, deliberated in total secrecy. Most narratives focus on the dramatic debates in the Cabinet Room, during which America’s leaders changed their positions frequently as they searched desperately for the proper mix of diplomatic and military pressure.

Dobbs gives relatively short shrift to that first week, covering it in only 54 pages. His focus — extending over almost half the book — is Oct. 27, “Black Saturday,” the darkest day of the cold war. On that day a Soviet missile team in Cuba shot down a U-2, killing its pilot; the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended immediate military retaliation; Castro sent Khrushchev a wildly emotional letter saying that he was facing an imminent American invasion, and Khrushchev sent a second letter to Kennedy, far tougher than an earlier one. That night men in Washington went to sleep not knowing (as Dean Rusk told me later) if they would awake in the morning, and wives debated whether to stay in Washington with their husbands or go to safer rural hideaways. (Almost all stayed, including Jackie Kennedy.)

By Black Saturday, the two leaders seem to have been transformed by the magnitude of this crisis. But as they searched for a peaceful, face-saving way out, their military machines kept preparing for war. Dobbs is at his best in reconstructing the near misses, misunderstandings and unauthorized activities that could have led to an accidental war. He follows secret C.I.A. infiltration teams deep into the swamps of Cuba as they try to carry out a previously authorized plan to sabotage a copper mine. He traces the flight of a U-2 pilot, Chuck Maultsby, who, confused by the Northern Lights, wanders hundreds of miles into Soviet airspace and somehow escapes without triggering a Soviet reaction. (“There’s always some sonofabitch who doesn’t get the word,” Kennedy notes with characteristic irony.) Dobbs also finds Soviet missile unit commanders in Cuba who, uninstructed by Moscow, prepare to fire missiles at the United States on their own authority if they feel threatened. And all the while, some military leaders in each country agitate for military action.

In Washington, the Joint Chiefs, whose members include several World War II giants, push for action. Gen. Curtis LeMay, the brutal, cigar-chomping Air Force chief of staff, with 3,000 nuclear weapons under his command, barks at Kennedy that his blockade of Cuba is “almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich.” In a dramatic confrontation in a Pentagon war room, the chief of naval operations tells Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara that the Navy will handle any engagement with the Soviets in accordance with long-standing Navy procedures and tradition, and needs no supervision from civilians. Furious, McNamara puts new procedures into place that give him and the president greater direct operational control — or so they think.

More than 40 years later, there is no longer any dispute about the most critical meeting of the crisis. It started at 8:05 p.m. on Black Saturday, when, at Kennedy’s instruction, his brother Bobby summoned the Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin, to his cavernous office in the Justice Department, and told him that the crisis had reached its moment of truth. “We’re going to have to make certain decisions within the next 12, or possibly 24 hours,” he declared. With the downing of the American U-2 that day, Bobby Kennedy said the American military, and not only the generals, were demanding that the president “respond to fire with fire.” This meeting, coupled with a letter to Khrushchev skillfully drafted by Bobby Kennedy, Ted Sorensen and others, led to the Soviet announcement the next day that the missiles would be removed from Cuba.

But threats were only part of Kennedy’s brilliantly calibrated approach. He also offered Khrushchev a public pledge that the United States would not invade Cuba again, a virtually meaningless offer from Washington but politically valuable for Khrushchev with Castro. And there was one more thing — a secret both sides obscured for years — the story of the Jupiter missiles in Turkey. The Soviets had suggested they would remove their missiles from Cuba if the United States withdrew its 15 medium-range Jupiter missiles from Turkey. By the time these missiles had been deployed in early 1962, they were already obsolete; Kennedy had asked that they be removed before the missile crisis, but no action had been taken.

Kennedy was more than willing to dismantle them, but he was determined not to leave a public impression that he had made any sort of deal or “trade” with Moscow. Asked by Dobrynin about the Jupiters, Bobby Kennedy said they were not an “insurmountable obstacle” but that they could not be linked — ever — to the withdrawal of the Soviet missiles. Bobby Kennedy also said that there would have to be a time lag of several months before their removal. It was this “non-deal deal” that opened the door for a resolution. In “Thirteen Days,” his posthumously published chronicle of the crisis, Bobby Kennedy carefully edited his account of the Dobrynin meeting to remove any hint of a deal on Turkey. But almost from the beginning, many people suspected the truth, and looking back on it today, it may seem surprising to see how hard the Kennedys sought to conceal it. But in 1962, with the midterm elections days away, Kennedy did not want to appear weak.

Dobbs’s research uncovers some juicy nuggets for history buffs. My favorite is the debunking of the once-famous “back-channel” between the ABC reporter John Scali and Aleksandr Feklisov, a K.G.B. station chief. The Kennedy administration attached great importance to this connection, and spent much time drafting a message for Scali to give to Feklisov. But on the basis of extensive analysis and interviews, Dobbs believes that the so-called back channel was a self-generated effort by an ambitious spy to send some information to his bosses in Moscow, as well as self-promotion by an ambitious journalist, who parlayed his meetings with the K.G.B. agent into a public legend that eventually led to his becoming the American ambassador to the United Nations. Dobbs, one of the most thorough journalists in Washington, concludes that “there is no evidence” the K.G.B. cable containing Scali’s message “played any role in Kremlin decision-making on the crisis, or was even read by Khrushchev.” He calls it “a classic example of miscommunication.” Nonetheless, Dobbs adds wryly, “the Scali-Feklisov meeting would become part of the mythology of the Cuban missile crisis.”

“One Minute to Midnight” is filled with similar insights that will change the views of experts and help inform a new generation of readers. For those not versed in the full story, I would recommend reading this book in conjunction with Frankel’s short and elegant overview. For those already familiar with the crisis, Dobbs’s account more than stands on its own.

It is hard to read this book without thinking about what would have happened if the current administration had faced such a situation — real weapons of mass destruction only 90 miles from Florida; the Pentagon urging “surgical” air attacks followed by an invasion; threatening letters from the leader of a real superpower and senators calling the president “weak” just weeks before a midterm Congressional election.

Life does not offer us a chance to play out alternative history, but it is not unreasonable to assume that the team that invaded Iraq would have attacked Cuba. And if Dobbs is right, Cuba and the Soviet Union would have fought back, perhaps launching some of the missiles already in place. One can only conclude that our nation was extremely fortunate to have had John F. Kennedy as president in October 1962. Like all presidents, he made his share of mistakes, but when the stakes were the highest imaginable, he rose to the occasion like no other president in the last 60 years — defining his goal clearly and then, against the demands of hawks within his administration, searching skillfully for a peaceful way to achieve it.

Richard Holbrooke, a former American ambassador to the United Nations, is the author of “To End a War.”</sub>

[RocDoc]

THIS is an unbelievably executed political commentary/reminiscence:

[JACkory]

Real W.M.D.’s

[RocDoc]

whoa.

12 dead at fort hood??!

3 soldiers?
i shooter dead and 2 suspects in custody.

holy shit, what got into THOSE peoples' heads?

symapthies to the families and the nation....we're getting as fucked-in-the-head as the afghans, pakistanis and iraquis that now we're attacking our OWN fucking institutions...physically, violently, i mean.

'talk' is allowed, in the name of discourse.
attack with fucking words all you want, but to take up arms?

this shit's like eating your young....

[RocDoc]

oooh, a self-loathing american.

NOT very attractive...but, but....wait, you're excluding yourself from this, aincha?