Tag-Archive for » POLITICS «
“I’ve always said that Afghanistan would be the tougher fight,” General Petraeus said at the time.
Now the burden falls to him, at perhaps the decisive moment in President Obama’s campaign to reverse the deteriorating situation on the ground here and regain the momentum in this nine-year-old war. In many ways, General Petraeus is being summoned to Afghanistan at a moment similar to the one he faced three years ago in Iraq, when the situation seemed hopeless to a growing number of Americans and their elected representatives as well.
But there is a crucial difference: In Iraq, General Petraeus was called in to reverse a failed strategy put in place by previous commanders. In Afghanistan, General Petraeus was instrumental in developing and executing the strategy in partnership with Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal
General Petraeus, 57, brings an extraordinary set of skills to his new job: a Boy Scout’s charm, penetrating intelligence and a ferocious will to succeed. At ease with the press and the public, and an adept negotiator, General Petraeus will probably distinguish himself from his predecessor with the political skills that carried him through the most difficult months of the counteroffensive in Iraq known as the surge.
Remember the simple pleasures of life:
Listen to your favorite music every day.
Always have flowers on the table.
On the weekends, take off your watch and forget about the time.
Take a nap.
Each week bake some cookies, bread, or pie. Try even if you’ve never done so before.
Surprise a loved-one or friend with an unexpected gift.
Put an inspirational quote somewhere where you can see it everyday.
Never miss an opportunity to have fun.
Never miss a parade.
Buy a box of crayons and color some pictures with a child.
Read a child a story.
Give people plenty of well-deserved compliments.
Try to save a quarter every day. You’ll be surprised about how much you’ll save within a short time. Spend it on a rainy day.
Keep a journal where you can explore your thoughts and feelings.
Give someone special a kiss and hug.
Call three friends and plan to get together with them.
Get out the camera and take some silly photos of yourself and a friend. Don’t be afraid to dress up.
Go outside and enjoy the beauty of nature.
Buy a gift for a child.
Go to the pet store and play with the kittens and puppies.
Read your favorite love poem and escape to romantic dreams.
Buy a book and some fresh flowers.
Visit a museum or art gallery.
Do something different.
Never forget that miracles happen every day.
Think something positive about yourself every day.
Think something positive about the other people in your life every day.
ENJOY YOUR HOLIDAY WEEKEND BLOGGERS!
With all the commentaries coming from various states regarding Arizona’s decision on
in essence profiling, have you look into your own backyards for justice.
I’m not upholding Arizona’s decision, but for other states to get on the band wagon is
not fare. To denied essential goods into the state whether commerce or social activities.
is not right. We do understand there is a serious plight of unemployment throughout the
nation, this effects more than just your average commentaries. Let the politicians hammer
out a definitive agreement, with a compromise for all involved. I’m not saying I agree or
disagree, but be fair in your judgement analysis of immigration.
At this point, I believe most Americans would accept the jobs folks thought we wouldn’t
work. Bills have to be paid, families cared for and raised. The state in which I reside wants
to ban certain aspects of Arizona to our state, are you kidding me. Our city is a mess let’s
try to cleanup our own backyard prior to denouncing another. With any decisions comes changes
and challenges, how we cope with those states who we are.
Andrew M. Manis is associate professor of history at Macon State College in Georgia and wrote this for an editorial in the Macon Telegraph.
Andrew M. Manis: When Are WE Going to Get Over It?
For much of the last forty years, ever since America “fixed” its race problem in the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, we white people have been impatient with African Americans who continued to blame race for their difficulties. Often we have heard whites ask, “When are African Americans finally going to get over it?
Now I want to ask:
“When are we White Americans going to get over our ridiculous obsession with skin color?
Recent reports that “Election Spurs Hundreds’ of Race Threats, Crimes” should frighten and infuriate every one of us. Having grown up in “Bombingham,” Alabama in the 1960s, I remember overhearing an avalanche of comments about what many white classmates and their parents wanted to do to John and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King.
Eventually, as you may recall, in all three cases, someone decided to do more than “talk the talk.”
Since our recent presidential election, to our eternal shame we are once again hearing the same reprehensible talk I remember from my boyhood.
We white people have controlled political life in the disunited colonies and United States for some 400 years on this continent.
Conservative whites have been in power 28 of the last 40 years. Even during the eight Clinton years, conservatives in Congress blocked most of his agenda and pulled him to the right. Yet never in that period did I read any headlines suggesting that anyone was calling for the assassinations of presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, or either of the Bushes. Criticize them, yes.
Call for their impeachment, perhaps. But there were no bounties on their heads. And even when someone did try to kill Ronald Reagan, the perpetrator was non-political mental case who wanted merely to impress Jody Foster.
But elect a liberal who happens to be Black and we’re back in the sixties again. At this point in our history, we should be proud that we’ve proven what conservatives are always saying — that in America anything is possible, EVEN electing a black man as president.
But instead we now hear that school children from Maine to California are talking about wanting to “assassinate Obama.”
Fighting the urge to throw up, I can only ask, “How long?”
How long before we white people realize we can’t make our nation, much less the whole world, look like us?
How long until we white people can – once and for all – get over this hell-conceived preoccupation with skin color?
How long until we white people get over the demonic conviction that white skin makes us superior?
How long before we white people get over our bitter resentments about being demoted to the status of equality with non-whites?
How long before we get over our expectations that we should be at the head of the line merely because of our white skin?
How long until we white people end our silence and call out our peers when they share the latest racist jokes in the privacy of our white-only conversations?
I believe in free speech, but how long until we white people start making racist loudmouths as socially uncomfortable as we do flag burners?
How long until we white people will stop insisting that blacks exercise personal responsibility, build strong families, educate themselves enough to edit the Harvard Law Review, and work hard enough to become President of the United States, only to threaten to assassinate them when they do?
How long before we start “living out the true meaning” of our creeds, both civil and religious, that all men and women are created equal and that “red and yellow, black and white” all are precious in God’s sight?
Until this past November 4, I didn’t believe this country would ever elect an African American to the presidency. I still don’t believe I’ll live long enough to see us white people get over our racism problem.
James S. Chanos built one of the largest fortunes on Wall Street by foreseeing the collapse of Enron and other highflying companies whose stories were too good to be true.
Now Mr. Chanos, a wealthy hedge fund investor, is working to bust the myth of the biggest conglomerate of all: China Inc.
As most of the world bets on China to help lift the global economy out of recession, Mr. Chanos is warning that China’s hyperstimulated economy is headed for a crash, rather than the sustained boom that most economists predict. Its surging real estate sector, buoyed by a flood of speculative capital, looks like “Dubai times 1,000 — or worse,” he frets. He even suspects that Beijing is cooking its books, faking, among other things, its eye-popping growth rates of more than 8 percent.
More from NYTimes.com:
• More on the Magic of RICO
• To Slow Growth, China Raises an Interest Rate
• Retailers See Holiday Sales Rebound From 2008
“Bubbles are best identified by credit excesses, not valuation excesses,” he said in a recent appearance on CNBC. “And there’s no bigger credit excess than in China.” He is planning a speech later this month at the University of Oxford to drive home his point.
As America’s pre-eminent short-seller — he bets big money that companies’ strategies will fail — Mr. Chanos’s narrative runs counter to the prevailing wisdom on China. Most economists and governments expect Chinese growth momentum to continue this year, buoyed by what remains of a $586 billion government stimulus program that began last year, meant to lift exports and consumption among Chinese consumers.
Still, betting against China will not be easy. Because foreigners are restricted from investing in stocks listed inside China, Mr. Chanos has said he is searching for other ways to make his bets, including focusing on construction- and infrastructure-related companies that sell cement, coal, steel and iron ore.
Mr. Chanos, 51, whose hedge fund, Kynikos Associates, based in New York, has $6 billion under management, is hardly the only skeptic on China. But he is certainly the most prominent and vocal.
For all his record of prescience — in addition to predicting Enron’s demise, he also spotted the looming problems of Tyco International, the Boston Market restaurant chain and, more recently, home builders and some of the world’s biggest banks — his detractors say that he knows little or nothing about China or its economy and that his bearish calls should be ignored.
“I find it interesting that people who couldn’t spell China 10 years ago are now experts on China,” said Jim Rogers, who co-founded the Quantum Fund with George Soros and now lives in Singapore. “China is not in a bubble.”
Colleagues acknowledge that Mr. Chanos began studying China’s economy in earnest only last summer and sent out e-mail messages seeking expert opinion.
But he is tagging along with the bears, who see mounting evidence that China’s stimulus package and aggressive bank lending are creating artificial demand, raising the risk of a wave of nonperforming loans.
“In China, he seems to see the excesses, to the third and fourth power, that he’s been tilting against all these decades,” said Jim Grant, a longtime friend and the editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, who is also bearish on China. “He homes in on the excesses of the markets and profits from them. That’s been his stock and trade.”
Mr. Chanos declined to be interviewed, citing his continuing research on China. But he has already been spreading the view that the China miracle is blinding investors to the risk that the country is producing far too much.
“The Chinese,” he warned in an interview in November with Politico.com, “are in danger of producing huge quantities of goods and products that they will be unable to sell.”
In December, he appeared on CNBC to discuss how he had already begun taking short positions, hoping to profit from a China collapse.
In recent months, a growing number of analysts, and some Chinese officials, have also warned that asset bubbles might emerge in China.
The nation’s huge stimulus program and record bank lending, estimated to have doubled last year from 2008, pumped billions of dollars into the economy, reigniting growth.
But many analysts now say that money, along with huge foreign inflows of “speculative capital,” has been funneled into the stock and real estate markets.
A result, they say, has been soaring prices and a resumption of the building boom that was under way in early 2008 — one that Mr. Chanos and others have called wasteful and overdone.
“It’s going to be a bust,” said Gordon G. Chang, whose book, “The Coming Collapse of China” (Random House), warned in 2001 of such a crash.
Friends and colleagues say Mr. Chanos is comfortable betting against the crowd — even if that crowd includes the likes of Warren E. Buffett and Wilbur L. Ross Jr., two other towering figures of the investment world.
A contrarian by nature, Mr. Chanos researches companies, pores over public filings to sift out clues to fraud and deceptive accounting, and then decides whether a stock is overvalued and ready for a fall. He has a staff of 26 in the firm’s offices in New York and London, searching for other China-related information.
“His record is impressive,” said Byron R. Wien, vice chairman of Blackstone Advisory Services. “He’s no fly-by-night charlatan. And I’m bullish on China.”
Mr. Chanos grew up in Milwaukee, one of three sons born to the owners of a chain of dry cleaners. At Yale, he was a pre-med student before switching to economics because of what he described as a passionate interest in the way markets operate.
His guiding philosophy was discovered in a book called “The Contrarian Investor,” according to an account of his life in “The Smartest Guys in the Room,” a book that chronicled Enron’s rise and downfall.
After college, he went to Wall Street, where he worked at a series of brokerage houses before starting his own firm in 1985, out of what he later said was frustration with the way Wall Street brokers promoted stocks.
At Kynikos Associates, he created a firm focused on betting on falling stock prices. His theories are summed up in testimony he gave to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce in 2002, after the Enron debacle. His firm, he said, looks for companies that appear to have overstated earnings, like Enron; were victims of a flawed business plan, like many Internet firms; or have been engaged in “outright fraud.”
That short-sellers are held in low regard by some on Wall Street, as well as Main Street, has long troubled him.
Short-sellers were blamed for intensifying market sell-offs in the fall 2008, before the practice was temporarily banned. Regulators are now trying to decide whether to restrict the practice.
Mr. Chanos often responds to critics of short-selling by pointing to the critical role they played in identifying problems at Enron, Boston Market and other “financial disasters” over the years.
“They are often the ones wearing the white hats when it comes to looking for and identifying the bad guys,” he has said.
article by David Barboza; thanks for an indept article.
This is important information, save it for later.
BEIJING (Reuters) – China on Saturday again denounced U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, saying they were an intrusion in Chinese internal affairs that risked undermining its relations with the United States.
The latest condemnation by the Chinese Foreign Ministry was directed at a $1.1 billion order received by Raytheon Co for ground-system hardware to support Taiwan’s Patriot air defense capability.
China on Thursday denounced the U.S. decision to clear the sale of Patriot missiles by Lockheed Martin to Taiwan, which Beijing sees as a renegade province.
The Chinese Defense Ministry also expressed its anger, saying late on Friday on its website (www.mod.gov.cn) that it reserved “the right to take further actions”. This warning followed comments earlier this week by a Chinese military official who proposed sanctioning U.S. firms that sell arms to Taiwan.
The Patriot hardware, some of the best in its class, could shoot down Chinese short-range and mid-range missiles, defense analysts say. The sale rounds out a $6.5 billion arms package approved under then U.S. President George W. Bush in late 2008.
China has claimed sovereignty over self-ruled Taiwan since 1949, when Mao Zedong’s Communists won the Chinese civil war and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists fled to the island. Beijing has vowed to bring Taiwan under its rule, by force if necessary.
The United States switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979, recognizing “one China”. But it remains Taiwan’s biggest ally and is obligated by the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act to help in the island’s defense.
WEST PALM BEACH, Florida (Reuters) – U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said on Friday a newly created interagency task force was focusing on financial fraud and targeting for possible prosecution bankers whose actions contributed to the financial crisis.
Speaking at a civic group meeting in West Palm Beach, Florida, Holder said the task force, which was created by President Barack Obama in November and met for the first time last month, would focus on fraud in mortgages, securities, economic stimulus programs and government bailouts.
He said the Justice Department and the task force also were investigating banks and other financial institutions whose failure to follow laws and regulations were in part to blame for the most serious financial crisis the United States has faced since the Great Depression.
“There are a number of investigations under way that I can’t really comment on, that I think will ultimately hold accountable a fair number of people at some of these institutions who didn’t make bad choices necessarily, but who really did wrong,” Holder said.
“We expect that we can identify those people and make provable cases (and) we will bring them,” he added.
He did not identify any specifically targeted institutions, but the comment came in response to a question about what the Justice Department was doing to address financial institutions considered too big to fail.
Holder said earlier in a speech the task force was making tackling financial fraud a priority, especially where this involved discrimination against minorities and the elderly.
“To those who see victimization of others as an avenue to wealth, take notice: If you fabricate a financial statement, if you propagate an investment scheme, if you are complicit in an act of financial fraud, you are writing your ticket to jail,” he said.
Holder said financial crime had become all too common and Palm Beach “is, in many respects, ground zero for the $65 billion Ponzi scheme perpetrated by Bernard Madoff — the largest investor fraud case in our nation’s history.”
Madoff owned an 8,700-square foot home nearby. The mansion’s value will be known when federal marshals auction it, Holder said.
“Last year, Allen Stanford, Tom Petters and, most recently, Fort Lauderdale attorney Scott Rothstein, who is alleged to have run a $1 billion investment scam, joined Bernie Madoff in becoming headline news and household names,” Holder said.
“I’m proud that these men, along with more than 450 others convicted of corporate and securities fraud in 2009, have been taken out of the game.”
Holder said the Justice Department was moving forward on more than 5,000 pending financial institution fraud cases and the FBI was investigating more than 2,800 mortgage fraud cases — up nearly 400 percent from five years ago.
Financial fraud has become an increasingly fraught political issue after a spike in mortgage scams and big Wall Street trading scandals.
The purpose of the task force, led by the Justice Department, is to investigate and prosecute financial crimes and to try to deter future fraud.
The task force replaced a similar one established by the Bush administration in 2002 after corporate scandals such as the collapse of Enron Corp, the giant energy trader
Only 12 members of Congress voted to approve health benefits for “1st Responders” to 911 Twin Towers.
Yes the Democrats overwhelmingly passed it. It has been years since 911 and the folks that involved
their lives to save whomever are now greatly disturbed with health concerns – OK who knew. What the
outcome effects would be. These folks Fire Dept, Police Dept, Medics put there lives on the line to help.
And this is how Congress rewards them for a job well done to the best of their ability – well damn Congress.
And you wonder why – folks are voting for anybody other than the incumbent to stand for there City,
or State reps. How dare you put these folks on the back burner. Do you have no shame or guilt what you
are doing to these folks. Understandably the economics in this country are steep, why do you think that
President Obama wanted the Health Care Reform bill past. Not just for future clients, but present ones in
need as well. Congress when are you going to get off your azz and stop throwing a rock and then hiding
your hand. You took your offices with a “vow” to pledge and help your constituents of your state and
others. Do not turn a blind eye to the needs of Americans, families are involved here and future generations.
Have you thought about what your legacy would be when you depart your office? Was it to help or hinder
the causes of citizens of the USA? Or is it money talks and bullshyt walks Congressmen Republicans.