...Entertaining takedown of the Hubris leading to and surrounding Obamacare. Excerpt: "More recent numbers suggest that the federal exchange has enrolled about 27,000 customers since October 1, which amounts to about half an enrollee for each Obamacare navigator. (Someone in the White House is surely thinking, Hey, lets just hire another 14,000,000 navigators! Problem solved.)"
#1
I can't get with the spirit of this piece. This regime has made such a mockery of our system of government that I can't laugh any of it off.
The latest EPA attempt to control ALL water, Ocare theft, total serfdom being implemented one step at a time.....nope not funny, not funny at all.
The elite conservatives don't really see the problem because they are protected from reality as much as the liberals. Oh its not too bad they say among themselves, what we really have to do is watch out for those Tea Party lunatics, they're the ones that want to overturn our cushy apple cart.
Individuals have less and less freedom and control over their own lives with each passing day. The Constitution, especially the BoR might as well be written on toilet paper.
Posted by: Thurong Protector of the Lichtensteiners3524 ||
11/14/2013 12:36 Comments ||
Top||
#6
I'm listening to this stumble bum on the teevee ramble on and for the life of me, I can't figure out what he is saying or doing about the so-called grandfather clause.
#16
And right on time - a new Downfall parody, with more Downfall goodness, including video excerpts from real Obama speeches.
Honestly, I think now there is a new addition to the 'big lies' truism: 'The check is in the mail', 'If you get pregnant, I'll marry you,' and 'If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.'
#17
...just free-associating here, but if Mr. Obama is unsuccessful in unburning the Obamacare bridges with the insurance companies, might he, as an intermediate step towards Single Payer, be inclined to Nationalize them..?
[Pak Daily Times] A tiff has erupted between the Pakistain army and its best men of several decades' standing. The emir of the Jamaat-e-Islami ...The Islamic Society, founded in 1941 in Lahore by Maulana Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi, aka The Great Apostosizer. The Jamaat opposed the independence of Bangladesh but has operated an independent branch there since 1975. It maintains close ties with international Mohammedan groups such as the Moslem Brotherhood. the Taliban, and al-Qaeda. The Jamaat's objectives are the establishment of a pure Islamic state, governed by Sharia law. It is distinguished by its xenophobia, and its opposition to Westernization, capitalism, socialism, secularism, and liberalist social mores... (JI), Mr Syed Munawar Hasan, ruffled quite a few feathers with his callous remarks about martyrdom last week. Mr Hasan not only called the slain Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistain (TTP) ringleader Hakeemullah Mehsud a shaheed -- a martyr in the divine sense of the word -- but also impugned the martyrdom status of the armed forces men who laid down their lives fighting the TTP and its ilk. The military shot back, quite understandably, with a statement castigating the JI chief and demanded an apology. The ISPR blurb, however, did qualify its criticism of Mr Munawar Hasan with an unqualified exhortation for the JI's founding emir, the late Maulana Syed Abul Aala Maududi. Interestingly, the military ruler, General Ayub Khan, had imprisoned Maulana Maududi twice in the 1960s. But the military had consorted with the Islamists before and continued to do so after Ayub Khan.
The military establishment, under General Yahya Khan, a man not exactly known for religious observance, groomed the Islamist political parties like the JI and Jamaat-e-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI) as a policy. Mr Shuja Nawaz notes in his book Crossed Swords: Pakistain, its Army and the Wars Within that these two parties "received assistance from (General) Sher Ali Khan Pataudi, who found an ally in Major General Ghulam Umar, the newly promoted executive head of the National Security Council." The idea was to actively upend the popular political forces like the Pakistain People's Party (PPP) and the National Awami Party (NAP) with pliable political elements. In his work Pakistain: Between Mosque and Military, the former ambassador Professor Husain Haqqani describes this strategy as the "Sher Ali Formula", which "required behind-the-scenes manipulation of the political process, to increase the number of political contenders, as well as identification of 'patriotic factions' against 'unpatriotic' ones." The alliance matured when the JI mercenaries fought alongside the army in the botched but brutal attempt to crush the 1971 Bengali nationalist struggle.
While the military under General Zia sought to use the JI and its ilk to legitimise their rule on religio-political grounds, the JI wanted to push their fanatical agenda through the junta. But just like the security establishment presumed that it could somehow turn off the field jihadists' switch once the job is done, it also misread the intentions and zeal of its JI-type allies. The jihadists and their political fronts like the JI are in it for the long haul. They do not operate on a 9-5 clock and take the weekends off. The security establishment's à la carte approach to jihadism is what the TTP and the JI both are livid about. The former ISPR chief pinning the JI for harbouring al Qaeda operatives is interesting, but it would take more than a few retaliatory words to roll back the jihadist project his parent outfit had sired together with the political clergy. The military and the mullahs have coauthored the hyper-nationalist narrative prevalent in Pakistain. Even under the 'enlightened moderate' General Pervez Perv Musharraf ... former dictator of Pakistain, who was less dictatorial and corrupt than any Pak civilian government to date ... , the electoral mandate was manipulated to hand power to the mullahs in two provinces. The mullahs have kept their end of the bargain. They do not like the change of rules in midgame. That the security establishment continues to consort with the chosen jihadists is also not lost on the JI and the TTP.
The latest example of the Pak security establishment turning a blind eye to, if not facilitating, the Afghan jihadists is the murder of the Haqqani terrorist network (HQN) top financier Nasiruddin Haqqani just outside Islamabad. Nasiruddin was son of Jalaluddin Haqqani from an Arab wife, and full brother of the HQN's de facto chief, Sirajuddin. It has been an open secret for several years that Nasiruddin and his uncles Ibrahim and Khalil have operated in Islamabad's vicinity. Nasiruddin leveraged his Arab connections to raise funds for attacks inside Afghanistan while his uncles have been known to induce, personally and through enforcers working out of Rawalpindi, ostensible peace deals such as the 2011 Kurram accord. Sirajuddin Haqqani had played a decisive role in the selection of the TTP chiefs in the past, and possibly in Mullah Fazlullah ...son-in-law of holy man Sufi Mohammad. Known as Mullah FM, Fazlullah had the habit of grabbing his FM mike when the mood struck him and bellowing forth sermons. Sufi suckered the Pak govt into imposing Shariah on the Swat Valley and then stepped aside whilst Fazlullah and his Talibs imposed a reign of terror on the populace like they hadn't seen before, at least not for a thousand years or so. For some reason the Pak intel services were never able to locate his transmitter, much less bomb it. After ruling the place like a conquered province for a year or so, Fazlullah's Talibs began gobbling up more territory as they pushed toward Islamabad, at which point as a matter of self-preservation the Mighty Pak Army threw them out and chased them into Afghanistan... 's recent ascent as the terror group's ringleader as well. It is unlikely that the Pak establishment has not been aware of the al Qaeda-affiliated HQN's activities near the federal capital.
Syed Munawar Hasan and indeed JUI's Maulana Fazlur Rehman Deobandi holy man, known as Mullah Diesel during the war against the Soviets, his sympathies for the Taliban have never been tempered by honesty ... 's crass remarks have made even the worst critics of the army queasy. It is for the security establishment to reflect over and revisit its association with unsavoury characters from both sides of the Durand Line. But it would be naïve to assume that decades of damage can be undone with one statement. Peace in Afghanistan and Pakistain requires a policy overhaul on the part of the security establishment, not just a knee-jerk reaction only when its toes are stepped on.
Posted by: Fred ||
11/14/2013 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[11130 views]
Top|| File under: Govt of Pakistan
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
...the creepy-looking former dictator of Pakistain. Zia was an Islamic nutball who imposed his nutballery on the rest of the country with the enthusiastic assistance of the nation's religious parties, which are populated by other nutballs. He was appointed Chief of Army Staff in 1976 by Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, whom he hanged when he seized power. His time in office was a period of repression, with hundreds of thousands of political rivals, minorities, and journalists executed or tortured, including senior general officers convicted in coup-d'état plots, who would normally be above the law. As part of his alliance with the religious parties, his government helped run the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, providing safe havens, American equipiment, Saudi money, and Pak handlers to selected mujaheddin. Zia died along with several of his top generals and admirals and the then United States Ambassador to Pakistain Arnold Lewis Raphel when he was assassinated in a suspicious air crash near Bahawalpur in 1988...
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar
Pervez 
Maulana Fazlur Rehman
