The End of the American Century?

[sonnyt111]

http://news.yahoo.com/why-santa-barbara-shootings-not-just-gun-control-194905307.html

 

 

 

 

Why Santa Barbara shootings are not just about gun control

 

The rampage that left seven people dead near Santa Barbara, Calif., fit the trend of past shooting sprees: A young, angry, white man trying to draw attention to the ways he felt mistreated by society. That means neither gun control nor mental health is the core issue, some experts say.

http://l.yimg.com/a/i/us/nws/p/csm_logo_115.jpg By Mark Sappenfield 23 hours ago

• [/url]

<h3 class="topic-bar-header"></h3>The fingers are already pointing, the headlines already blaring. Once again, a young man, angry at the world, has ended his life in a hail of gunfire, taking with him innocent victims.

When Elliot Rodger drove through the streets of Isla Vista, Calif., Friday night, his guns chewing through some of the hundreds of rounds of ammunition police said were in his car, some said he was yet another example of how a lack of meaningful gun control has made mass killings too easy. One victim's father openly wept, "The talk about gun rights.... When will enough people say: 'Stop this madness!' "

 

Reports that Mr. Rodger had been receiving psychiatric care and had been diagnosed with a mild form of Asperger's, others countered, was proof of a mental health crisis in the United States. The shooting spree was the work of a "mad man," the sheriff of nearby Santa Barbara concluded.

 

And on the web, feminist blogs were noting that Rodger's YouTube videos showed a man who had become so warped by a misogynistic society that objectifies women that he felt it was justice to hunt down and k*ll college-age girls because none had ever dated him.

 

In the yearning to make some sense of a rampage that left seven people dead, including the suspect, and 13 people injured, the public and the media have once again begun searching for elements of Rodger's life that fit the narrative of a mass killer. Some and perhaps all surely played a role.

 

But to researchers who have studied the trend, these are secondary – though important – factors. The young men who are overwhelmingly responsible for these shooting sprees fit a very clear portrait: self-obsessed yet marginalized in some way. Their rampages are not fits of senseless rage, but cold, calculating attempts to level the score with society.

 

In the attempt to become an antihero – to lay bare how they think they have been wronged by others – these men need an audience, and shooting sprees are the ultimate way to get one.

 

"Mass shootings are a kind of theater," wrote Ari Schulman, editor of the journal The New Atlantis, in The Wall Street Journal last year. "Their purpose is essentially terrorism – minus, in most cases, a political agenda. The public spectacle, the mass slaughter of mostly random victims, is meant to be seen as an attack against society itself."

 

The senselessness "is just the point of mass shootings: It is the means by which the perpetrator seeks to make us feel his hatred," he added.

 

Indeed, to researchers, neither the mass killer nor his motives are a mystery, and many aspects of Rodger's life fit squarely into trends observed by researchers.

 

Rodger left a long trail across the Internet, both with YouTube videos and online message board postings, that appear to explain why he launched his "Day of Retribution." As short and mixed-race (Asian and Anglo), Rodger was perpetually insecure about his looks. Yet his videos repeatedly speak to a sense of entitlement with women – he deserved their love and was anguished at their lack of interest despite his jet-setting lifestyle as the son of a Hollywood director. (His father was an assistant director for the first "Hunger Games.")

 

This perceived slight became the fuel for his anger. In a YouTube video that has since been removed, he vowed: "I'm going to enter the hottest sorority house of [the University of California at Santa Barbara] and I will slaughter every single spoilt, stuck-up, blonde ... that I see inside there."

 

According to a Washington Post timeline, Rodger knocked on the door of the Alphi Phi sorority house for two minutes Friday night. When no one answered, he walked across the street to his car and opened fire, killing two women and injuring a third before driving away.

 

In a 2010 article, James Knoll, director of forensic psychiatry at the State University of New York's Upstate Medical University, wrote that mass killers are " 'collectors of injustice' who nurture their wounded narcissism."

 

Others have pointed to a narcissistic streak in Rodger. Forbes's Kashmir Hill writes:

 

Rodger’s

Facebook page

is full of selfies and photos of his rich but lonely life. There are photos of him, by himself, flying first class and attending a private Katy Perry concert, and with his parents, at the Hunger Games premiere in 2012; his father was an assistant director of the film. Friends are generally absent from the photos and make few comments; he likes many of his own photos, and is usually the only one to do so. He was obsessed with himself and with putting his opulent lifestyle on display, and Facebook was the perfect outlet for it.

 

A mass killing, then, becomes a plea for attention – an attempt by the chronically overlooked to be heard, and feared. To Mr. Schulman, that means the particulars of each case – looking at motive, mental health, or misogyny – are less important than the way society reacts. When the media spread fear, broadcast a killer's manifesto, and endlessly show his photos, they fuel the next round of potential mass killers by helping the last one accomplish his goals.

 

Mass killings, he suggests, are contagious. He likens them with suicides, noting a rash of suicides on the subway system in Vienna in 1984. Suicides fell by 75 percent after a group of researchers at the Austrian Association for Suicide Prevention persuaded local media to change their coverage "by minimizing details and photos, avoiding romantic language and simplistic explanations of motives, moving the stories from the front page and keeping the word 'suicide' out of the headlines."

 

Speaking of mass killings, Schulman added: "Whatever the witch's brew of influences that produced this grisly script, treating mass killings as a kind of epidemic or contagion largely frees us from having to understand the particular causes of each act. Instead, we can focus on disrupting the spread."

 

 

/news.yahoo.com/why-santa-barbara-shootings-not-just-gun-control-194905307.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[lukewarmwater82]

I don't think the "American Century" will end soon. Despite all the negative things you hear about the USA, it is still the most innovative, diverse and productive country in the world. It is still a very attractive destination for all the smartest people in the world. The engine that drives the US economy is not Wall Street. On the other hand, it is the innovation (Science, Research, Engineering) that takes place in its topnotch universities and companies. There is a reason why China is now investing a lot in its research universities. But China still has a long way to go. In my opinion, not even Japan or Korea or Europe comes close to US in terms of innovations and scientific discoveries.

[maxiev]

I don't think the "American Century" will end soon. Despite all the negative things you hear about the USA, it is still the most innovative, diverse and productive country in the world. It is still a very attractive destination for all the smartest people in the world. The engine that drives the US economy is not Wall Street. On the other hand, it is the innovation (Science, Research, Engineering) that takes place in its topnotch universities and companies. There is a reason why China is now investing a lot in its research universities. But China still has a long way to go. In my opinion, not even Japan or Korea or Europe comes close to US in terms of innovations and scientific discoveries.

Makes me wonder though why the USA needs to import the chemicals needed for lethal injections from Europe. I understand that Europe refuses to sell these chemicals to the USA because European countries are against the death penalty.

 

Why can't the USA produce it's own chemicals instead of considering returning to execution through hanging, firing squad, electric chair, etc.

[lukewarmwater82]

Makes me wonder though why the USA needs to import the chemicals needed for lethal injections from Europe. I understand that Europe refuses to sell these chemicals to the USA because European countries are against the death penalty.

 

Why can't the USA produce it's own chemicals instead of considering returning to execution through hanging, firing squad, electric chair, etc.

 

That is a very good point Maxiev. You would think the most powerful country on Earth can manufacture their own chemical for lethal injection. The reason for this is that there is only one distributor of that chemical in the US, and they stopped selling it for lethal injection purposes (company press release here: http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=175550&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1518610&highlight). Also, death penalty is not a federal law. And recently more states are abolishing death penalty (Illinois abolished it in 2011, Connecticut abolished it in 2012, and Maryland abolished it in 2013).

[lukewarmwater82]

"...by relegating more and more African-Americans to a state of constant dependency on government welfare."

 

I'm not sure where you got this information, but the data from USDA which implements the Food Stamp Program (now known as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, SNAP) tells a different story (link to data here: http://www.fns.usda.gov/sites/default/files/2012Characteristics.pdf) . If you look at Table A.21 which shows the demographics of "food stamp" recipients, the majority are white (37.6%). African-Americans on the other hand account for 23.6% of the program.

[viral]

"...by relegating more and more African-Americans to a state of constant dependency on government welfare."

 

I'm not sure where you got this information, but the data from USDA which implements the Food Stamp Program (now known as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, SNAP) tells a different story (link to data here: http://www.fns.usda....acteristics.pdf) . If you look at Table A.21 which shows the demographics of "food stamp" recipients, the majority are white (37.6%). African-Americans on the other hand account for 23.6% of the program.

 

In 2010 the U.S. population (308.7 million) was 72.4 percent European American (223.5 million) and 12.6 percent African American (38.9 million) (http://en.wikipedia....e_and_ethnicity).

 

Out of the total population, the percentage of whites on welfare was 38.8 and the percentage of blacks on welfare was 39.8 (http://www.statistic...are-statistics/).

 

Considering that blacks are only 12.6 percent of the total population, it would seem that African Americans account for a disproportionately large chunk of welfare, the biggest percentage, in fact.

 

Can someone who is more mathematically gifted validate this?

 

Just trying to get the context right here.

Edited June 7, 2014 by viral

[viral]

 

 

Speaking of good PR and slavery, I'm reminded that no party has been more successful in claiming to be the champion of civil rights than the Democratic Party, who - during the move to abolish slavery - were made up of a whole lot of anti-Semites and Ku Klux Klan members. I tend to think that they are achieving their agenda today, by relegating more and more African-Americans to a state of constant dependency on government welfare. Statistics show that more and more black kids are born out of wedlock, with disengaged fathers. Perhaps because single moms get bigger support than if they were married and working? How's that for an incentive system?

 

 

In fairness, Ms. D, you do have a point about African Americans and how welfare has been impacting on them as a demographic group.

 

 

HOW THE WELFARE STATE HAS DEVASTATED AFRICAN AMERICANS

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=1672

 

The rise of the welfare state in the 1960s contributed greatly to the demise of the black family as a stable institution. The out-of-wedlock birth rate among African Americans today is 73%, three times higher than it was prior to the War on Poverty. Children raised in fatherless homes are far more likely to grow up poor and to eventually engage in criminal behavior, than their peers who are raised in two-parent homes. In 2010, blacks (approximately 13% of the U.S. population) accounted for 48.7% of all arrests for homicide, 31.8% of arrests for forcible rape, 33.5% of arrests for aggravated assault, and 55% of arrests for robbery. Also as of 2010, the black poverty rate was 27.4% (about 3 times higher than the white rate), meaning that 11.5 million blacks in the U.S. were living in poverty.

 

When President Lyndon Johnson in 1964 launched the so-called War on Poverty, which enacted an unprecedented amount of antipoverty legislation and added manynew layers to the American welfare state, he explained that his objective was to reduce dependency, "break the cycle of poverty," and make "taxpayers out of tax eaters." Johnson further claimed that his programs would bring to an end the "conditions that breed despair and violence," those being "ignorance, discrimination, slums, poverty, disease, not enough jobs." Of particular concern to Johnson was the disproportionately high rate of black poverty. In a famous June 1965 speech, the president suggested that the problems plaguing black Americans could not be solved by self-help: "You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line in a race and then say, 'you are free to compete with all the others,'" said Johnson.

 

Thus began an unprecedented commitment of federal funds to a wide range of measures aimed at redistributing wealth in the United States.[1] From 1965 to 2008, nearly $16 trillion of taxpayer money (in constant 2008 dollars) was spent onmeans-tested welfare programs for the poor.

 

The economic milieu in which the War on Poverty arose is noteworthy. As of 1965, the number of Americans living below the official poverty line had been declining continuously since the beginning of the decade and was only about half of what it had been fifteen years earlier. Between 1950 and 1965, the proportion of people whose earnings put them below the poverty level, had decreased by more than 30%. The black poverty rate had been cut nearly in half between 1940 and 1960. In various skilled trades during the period of 1936-59, the incomes of blacks relative to whites had more than doubled. Further, the representation of blacks in professional and other high-level occupations grew more quickly during the five years preceding the launch of the War on Poverty than during the five years thereafter.

 

Despite these trends, the welfare state expanded dramatically after LBJ's statement. Between the mid-Sixties and the mid-Seventies, the dollar value of public housing quintupled and the amount spent on food stamps rose more than tenfold. From 1965 to 1969, government-provided benefits increased by a factor of 8; by 1974 such benefits were an astounding 20 times higher than they had been in 1965. Alsoas of 1974, federal spending on social-welfare programs amounted to 16% of America's Gross National Product, a far cry from the 8% figure of 1960. By 1977 the number of people receiving public assistance had more than doubled since 1960.


 

The most devastating by-product of the mushrooming welfare state was the corrosive effect it had (along with powerful cultural phenomena such as the feminist and Black Power movements) on American family life, particularly in the black community.
 As provisions in welfare laws offered ever-increasing economic incentives for shunning marriage and avoiding the formation of two-parent families, illegitimacy rates rose dramatically.

 

For the next few decades, means-tested welfare programs such as food stamps, public housing, Medicaid, day care, and Temporary Assistance to Needy Familiespenalized marriage. A mother generally received far more money from welfare if she was single rather than married. Once she took a husband, her benefits were instantly reduced by roughly 10 to 20 percent. As a Cato Institute study noted, welfare programs for the poor incentivize the very behaviors that are most likely to perpetuate poverty.[2] Another Cato report observes:

 

"Of course women do not get pregnant just to get welfare benefits.... But, by removing the economic consequences of out-of-wedlock birth, welfare has removed a major incentive to avoid such pregnancies. A teenager looking around at her friends and neighbors is liable to see several who have given birth out-of- wedlock. When she sees that they have suffered few visible consequences ... she is less inclined to modify her own behavior to prevent pregnancy.... Current welfare policies seem to be designed with an appalling lack of concern for their impact on out-of-wedlock births. Indeed, Medicaid programs in 11 states actually provide infertility treatments to single women on welfare."

 

The marriage penalties that are embedded in welfare programs can be particularly severe if a woman on public assistance weds a man who is employed in a low-paying job. As a FamilyScholars.org report puts it: "When a couple's income nears the limits prescribed by Medicaid, a few extra dollars in income cause thousands of dollars in benefits to be lost. What all of this means is that the two most important routes out of poverty—marriage and work—are heavily taxed under the current U.S. system."[3]

 

The aforementioned FamilyScholars.org report adds that "such a system encourages surreptitious cohabitation," where "many low-income parents will cohabit without reporting it to the government so that their benefits won't be cut." These couples "avoid marriage because marriage would result in a substantial loss of income for the family."

 

A 2011 study conducted jointly by the Institute for American Values' Center for Marriage and Families and the University of Virginia's National Marriage Projectsuggests that "the rise of cohabiting households with children is the largest unrecognized threat to the quality and stability of children's family lives." The researchers conclude that cohabiting relationships are highly prone to instability, and that children in such homes are consequently less likely to thrive, more likely to be abused, and more prone to suffering "serious emotional problems."

 

William Galston, President Bill Clinton's Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs, estimated that the welfare system, with its economic disincentives to marriage, was responsible for at least 15% to 20% of the family disintegration in the United States. Libertarian scholar Charles Murray has placed the figure at somewhere around 50%. By Murray's reckoning, the growth and increased liberalization of the "welfare complex" have eroded the traditional ethos of working-class communities that once held people who worked at low-wage jobs, and men who married the mothers of their children, in much higher esteem than unwed parents who became wards of the state.

 

The phenomenon that Murray describes has been in clear evidence for decades. Consider, for instance, a Harlem-based initiative in the 1980s known as Project Redirection, whose aim was to persuade young women who had already borne one child out of wedlock to avoid repeating that mistake. According to the Manpower Development Research Corporation's evaluation report on this project: "[M]any [beneficiaries] were beginning to view getting their own welfare grants as the next stage in their careers.... t became apparent that some participants' requests for separate grants and independent households were too often a sign of manipulation by boyfriends, in whose interest it was to have a girlfriend on welfare with an apartment of her own."

 

The results of welfare policies discouraging marriage and family were dramatic, as out-of-wedlock birthrates skyrocketed among all demographic groups in the U.S., but most notably African Americans. In the mid-1960s, the out-of-wedlock birth rate was scarcely 3% for whites, 7.7% for Americans overall, and 24.5% among blacks. By 1976, those figures had risen to nearly 10% for whites, 24.7% for Americans as a whole, and 50.3% for blacks in particular. In 1987, for the first time in the history of any American racial or ethnic group, the birth rate for unmarriedblack women surpassed that for married black women. Today the illegitimacy rates stand at 41% for the nation overall, and 73% for African Americans specifically.[4]

 

Welfare not only increases illegitimacy and poverty in the short term, but it inflicts long-lasting, even permanent, handicaps on children who are raised in welfare-dependent homes. Dr. June O'Neill and Anne Hill, comparing children who were identical in terms of such social and economic factors as race, family structure, neighborhood, family income, and mothers' IQ and education, found that the more years a child spent on welfare, the lower the child's IQ. A similar study by Mary Corcoran and Roger Gordon of the University of Michigan concluded that the more welfare income a family received while a boy was growing up, the lower the boy's earnings as an adult.

 

The devastating societal consequences of family breakdown cannot be overstated. Father-absent families—black and white alike—generally occupy the bottom rung of America's economic ladder. According to the U.S Census, in 2008 the poverty rate for single parents with children was 35.6%; the rate for married couples with children was 6.4%. For white families in particular, the corresponding two-parent and single-parent poverty rates were 21.7% and 3.1%; for Hispanics, the figures were 37.5% and 12.8%; and for blacks, 35.3% and 6.9%. According to Robert Rector, senior research fellow with the Heritage Foundation, "the absence of marriage increases the frequency of child poverty 700 percent" and thus constitutes the single most reliable predictor of a self-perpetuating underclass. Articulating a similar theme many years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "Nothing is so much needed as a secure family life for a people to pull themselves out of poverty."

 

Children in single-parent households are burdened not only with economic, but also profound social and psychological, disadvantages. As a Heritage Foundation analysis notes, youngsters raised by single parents, as compared to those who grow up in intact married homes, are more likely to be physically abused; to be treated for emotional and behavioral disorders; to smoke, drink, and use drugs; to perform poorly in school; to be suspended or expelled from school; to drop out of high school; to behave aggressively and violently; to be arrested for a juvenile crime; to serve jail time before age 30; and to go on to experience poverty as adults.According to the National Fatherhood Initiative, 60% of rapists, 72% of adolescent murderers, and 70% of long-term prison inmates are men who grew up in fatherless homes. With regard to girls in particular, those raised by single mothers are more than twice as likely to give birth out-of-wedlock, thereby perpetuating the cycle of poverty for yet another generation.

 

The calamitous breakdown of the black family is a comparatively recent phenomenon, coinciding precisely with the rise of the welfare state. Throughout the epoch of slavery and into the early decades of the twentieth century, most black children grew up in two-parent households.
 Post-Civil War studies revealed that most black couples in their forties had been together for at least twenty years. In southern urban areas around 1880, nearly three-fourths of black households were husband-or father-present; in southern rural settings, the figure approached 86%. As of 1940, the illegitimacy rate among blacks nationwide was approximately 15%—scarcely one-fifth of the current figure.
 As late as 1950, black women were more likely to be married than white women, and only 9% of black families with children were headed by a single parent.

 

During the nine decades between the Emancipation Proclamation and the 1950s, the black family remained a strong, stable institution. Its cataclysmic destruction was subsequently set in motion by such policies as the anti-marriage incentives that are built into the welfare system have served only to exacerbate the problem. As George Mason University professor Walter E. Williams puts it: "The welfare state has done to black Americans what slavery couldn't do, what Jim Crow couldn't do, what the harshest racism couldn't do. And that is to destroy the black family." Hoover Institution Fellow Thomas Sowell concurs: "The black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life."

 

Just as welfare policies discourage marriage and the formation of stable families, they also discourage the development of a healthy work ethic. As Heritage Foundation scholar Michael Franc noted in 2012: "[T]he necessity of phasing out [welfare] benefits as incomes rise brings a serious moral hazard. In many cases, economists have calculated, welfare recipients who enter the work force or receive pay raises lose a dollar or more of benefits for each additional dollar they earn. The system makes fools of those who work hard." In testimony on Capitol Hill, Rep. Geoff Davis (R-Kentucky) concurred that although federal welfare programs "are designed to alleviate poverty while promoting work," collectively they have "an unintended side effect of discouraging harder work and higher earnings." "The more benefits the government provides," he said, "the stronger the disincentive to work." Yet another Capitol Hill witness, Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wisconsin)—herself a former welfare recipient—acknowledged in her oral testimony: "I once had a job and begged my supervisor not to give me a 50-cents-an-hour raise lest I lose Title 20 day care." The same work disincentive came into play when Moore contemplated the health coverage she was receiving through Medicaid. "I would want to work if in fact I didn't risk losing Medicaid," she said.

 

 

NOTES:

 

[1]Hoover Institution senior fellow Thomas Sowell writes: "Never had there been such a comprehensive program to tackle poverty at its roots, to offer more opportunities to those starting out in life, to rehabilitate those who had fallen by the wayside, and to make dependent people self-supporting.... The War on Poverty represented the crowning triumph of the liberal vision of society—and of government programs as the solution to social problems."

 

[2] For instance, "a 1 percent increase in the welfare-dependent population in a state increases the number of births to single mothers by about 0.5 percent," and "an increase in AFDC benefits by 1 percent of average income increases the number of births to single mothers by about 2.1 percent."

 

[3] The marriage penalties that are embedded in welfare programs can be particularly severe if a woman on public assistance weds a man who is employed in a low-paying job. Consider the hypothetical case, as outlined in May 2006 by Urban Institute senior fellow Eugene Steuerle, of a single mother with two children who earns $15,000 and enjoys an Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) benefit of approximately $4,100. If she marries a man earning $10,000, thereby boosting the total household income to $25,000, the EITC benefit, which decreases incrementally for every dollar a married couple earns above a certain level, would drop precipitously to $2,200. Similarly, consider the case (also outlined by Eugene Steuerle in May 2006) of a mother of two children who earns $20,000 and thus qualifies for Medicaid. If she marries someone earning just $6,000, resulting in a combined household income of $26,000, her children's Medicaid benefits are cut off entirely.

 

[4] For Hispanics, whites, and Asians, the illegitimacy rates are 53%, 26%, and 17%, respectively.

 

 

 

Edited June 7, 2014 by viral

[viral]

In 2010 the U.S. population (308.7 million) was 72.4 percent European American (223.5 million) and 12.6 percent African American (38.9 million) (http://en.wikipedia....e_and_ethnicity).

 

Out of the total population, the percentage of whites on welfare was 38.8 and the percentage of blacks on welfare was 39.8 (http://www.statistic...are-statistics/).

 

Considering that blacks are only 12.6 percent of the total population, it would seem that African Americans account for a disproportionately large chunk of welfare, the biggest percentage, in fact.

 

Can someone who is more mathematically gifted validate this?

 

Just trying to get the context right here.

 

Ok, the number of Americans on welfare is 12.8 million or 4.1 percent of the population. (http://www.statisticbrain.com/welfare-statistics/)

 

So that means about 5 million blacks are on welfare and 4.96 million whites are on welfare? Almost the same absolute numbers?

 

That's 12.5 percent of the back population being on welfare versus 2.2 percent of the white population being on welfare.

 

Someone help with the math please?

[oscartamaguchiblackface]

http://news.yahoo.com/bush-paid-terrorists-ransom-094500801--politics.html

 

 

When Bush Paid Terrorists a Ransom

By Michael Tomasky 9 hours ago

The Bowe Bergdahl story moves to the hearing stage this week, so we’ll be treated to the sight of preening House Republicans trying to press Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel on when it was that he, too, started hating America. Meanwhile, over in the fever swamps, speculation is growing about an alleged “ransom” the Obama administration may have paid to bring Bergdahl home. That Ollie North, of all people, started this talk is one of those laugh, cry, or shoot-the-television moments that now assault our synapses with such regularity; it’s like Judas calling John or James a traitor, or Bernie Madoff aspersing Warren Buffett as a swindler.

 

North aside, the charge is picking up steam. Fox “News” “reported” that a ransom was on the table last year. The Free Beacon the other day quoted a “senior intelligence official, who requested anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the press,” who “speculated” that a cash payoff to the Haqqani Network, Bergdahl’s captors, surely had to be involved; the whole story made no sense otherwise. Get the picture? The typical evidence-free allegation, oxygenated by rife speculation from the usual suspects, who have no knowledge of anything but just want to get a meme started. So far, among elected officials, only House GOPer Steve “I’m Even Too Out There for Texas Republicans” Stockman has uttered the r-word.

 

But what starts with Stockman rarely ends with Stockman. And so I predict this charge is going to become a central talking point on the right in the coming days and weeks. Why wouldn’t it? It’s as high-voltage an allegation as Republicans can muster up. It carries, in its crude form, a subtext not only of colossally naive misjudgment but quite possibly of treason: the idea that not merely did the Manchurian president pay too high a price in the form of the Taliban Five to get back a good-for-nothing deserter, but now he (the theory will go) paid cash money to an evil terrorist network, thus helping to finance the group’s operations against America. As North, who knows whereof he speaks on the subject of abetting terrorists, put it: “Was there a ransom paid? Did the government of the United States, either directly or indirectly, finance a terrorist organization?”

 

This would all be quite shocking if proved true, right? And maybe even legitimate grounds for impeachment. Funny, though—it somehow wasn’t either of those things in 2002, when the Bush administration did it.

 

We turn now to the Philippines, where the Abu Sayyaf terror network—Islamic fundamentalist, al Qaeda-linked, occupant of a slot on the State Department’s official terrorist-organization list since Bill Clinton put it there in 1997—was rampaging around the southern archipelago and taking Westerners hostage. Two such hostages were an American husband-and-wife missionary team, Martin and Gracia Burnham. They were kidnapped in May 2001. Their captivity was a pretty big story for a while, but then came September, and the inferno of Lower Manhattan.

 

The Abu Sayyaf M.O. was the normal one—to demand large (or oddly not so large; the original demand for the Burnhams’ safety was $1 million) sums of money for their captives’ safe return. There were talks, and they bled into 2002. In April of that year, Bush gave a speech that included the line: “No nation can negotiate with terrorists, for there is no way to make peace with those whose only goal is death.”

 

A nice line. But of course, at that exact moment, the United States was negotiating intently with Abu Sayyaf for the Burnhams’ release. And not only that: The Bush administration arranged an indirect payment to Abu Sayyaf of $300,000, as reported a little later by ABC’s John McWethy, the veteran Pentagon correspondent, and even by Fox’s Brent Baier, whose phrasing had it that “the U.S. government facilitated a ransom payment to al Qaeda-linked terrorists.”

 

It seems that the payment was indirect rather than direct. But these days, that’s good enough for Ollie North (go reread his quote above). Even an indirect payment by the Obama administration to the Haqqani Network would clearly have these people screaming for impeachment hearings.

 

But then? Well, that was different. It was after 9/11. Bush was our Churchill. We were strong then, united! And sure enough, I find little record of conservative talking heads or elected Republicans criticizing Bush then, and alas not even any sense that cowed Democrats said much of anything. Those were the days of watching what you said, watching what you did.

 

Oh. I forgot one detail. We “facilitated” the ransom, but even then we still failed: Poor Martin Burnham was killed in a skirmish when the Philippine army stormed the compound to rescue the couple. Gracia lived, and lives on now. But just imagine that Obama had “facilitated” a ransom to Haqqani, and yet Bergdahl had been killed during a rescue mission. I don’t think I need to complete that thought.

 

And so here we are again, in the land of conservative forgetting. I do hope, as these hearings commence and House Republicans start raising questions about a possible ransom, that some of their colleagues remind them.

 

 

 

 

[dungeonbaby]

you know it's a hack journalist when within the first two paragraphs he puts Fox "NEWS" inside quotation marks. this is an empty post citing a one-sided article. WONDER WHEN THE LEFT WILL STOP ATTACKING BUSH AND START ADDRESSING THE ISSUES.

 

 

point. talks of impeachment centered around this president failing to inform congress of this dangerous prisoner swap, not around talks of ransom paid on top of the outrageous release of KNOWN RUTHLESS MASS MURDERERS.

 

this attempt to dismiss the issue of exchanging a soldier, whom his unit has called a deserter, with 5 top Taliban guys who will most likely attack again smells like desperation. especially when there are other issues/scandals to address still:

 

immigration and the weak border being crossed by a thousand people every single day. and the thousands of children that were just deposited inside Texas.

 

the VA scandal which was first brought up with the US president in the Manila press con by Fox "NEWS." (CNN, though, broke the story. i suppose that makes it legitimate news?)

 

IRS targeting and the lost Lerner emails

 

Benghazi

 

oh and yeah, whatever happened to the fast & furious scandal?

 

let's have a round of golf.

[oscartamaguchiblackface]

Check out these cartoons.

[oscartamaguchiblackface]

More cartoons...

[lukewarmwater82]

Ok, the number of Americans on welfare is 12.8 million or 4.1 percent of the population. (http://www.statistic...are-statistics/)

 

So that means about 5 million blacks are on welfare and 4.96 million whites are on welfare? Almost the same absolute numbers?

 

That's 12.5 percent of the back population being on welfare versus 2.2 percent of the white population being on welfare.

 

Someone help with the math please?

 

You are right. Based on your source, in absolute numbers, Blacks and Whites have the same number of people on welfare. I have some doubts about your source though. They claim to have obtained their data from the US Dept of Commerce, but they didn't explain how they got to the actual numbers and didn't provide any link to the Dept of Commerce website.

 

 

 

[lukewarmwater82]

I am not a big fan of Obama. Observing US politics as an "outsider", I wouldn't pick any side - democrat or republican. I think both of them are more or less the same.

 

However, to be objective, I don't think Russia took Crimea because Obama is weak. It's just that Putin doesn't have to think about Obama (or any American president sitting) whenever he makes a decision. Same logic when USSR intervened in Hungary in 1956. They didnt do it because they thought Dwight Eisenhower was weak. More recent examples are Russian interventions in Moldova (1990) and in northern Georgia (2008). The Georgian invasion was even more severe, it was an actual war involving Russian tanks, troops, and warplanes. The Russians didnt intervene in Moldova in 1990 because they thought George HW Bush was weak. The Russians also didn't invade Georgia in 2008 because they thought George Bush was weak. It is just that Russia doesn't need to ask America to make a decision.

Edited June 25, 2014 by lukewarmwater82

[BossNuvo]

Like the cartoon on the Obama diet of Vlad for lunch. LOL.