Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Mictlantecuhtli]

Frankly, *my* foreign policy stance is "Fuck Israel". Cause seriously...fuck those guys. Nothing against the Israeli people, but you guys really need to pick better leaders, ones who don't use their protected special snowflake status to be a dick to everyone around them. I still maintain that if we started drawing down our multi-billion dollar annual defense subsidy to Israel, you'd see a hell of a lot more conciliation on their part to the Arab world.

I honestly think it's one of the most insulting things for a foreign politician we pay the bills of to come to our country and dictate to us what we should and shouldn't be doing, Jew or not, I'm not about to excuse that or rationalize it as anything but Israeli meddling in our affairs.

[FearfulJesuit]

If you have a breeder reactor or enrichment centrifuge, the knowledge (which isn't hard to get) and the necessary manufacturing equipment (piss easy, the stuff I have access to on a daily basis could probably manage it); making a functional nuclear bomb would be a matter of weeks, not months, most of which would be spend collecting the necessary explosive metal. Further, the only warning anyone would get that it was being built would be when it went off.

Well, that and the massive increase of activity during the building of it. It's not that easy to build one quickly AND undetected.

I don't think the American people have the stomach for yet another war in the Middle East. We've been blowing up camels for the better part of 13 years now, shit's getting old.
And I think another propaganda campaign to convince us that Iran has intent to nuke the US is going to fall flat. Fool us once, shame on us. Fool us twice...won't get fooled again. Or something.

Frankly, *my* foreign policy stance is "Fuck Israel". Cause seriously...fuck those guys. Nothing against the Israeli people, but you guys really need to pick better leaders, ones who don't use their protected special snowflake status to be a dick to everyone around them. I still maintain that if we started drawing down our multi-billion dollar annual defense subsidy to Israel, you'd see a hell of a lot more conciliation on their part to the Arab world.

This is mostly a consequence of Israel's voting procedures, just like the inertia of America's first-past-the-post system produces a two-party system by default. Instead of dividing up the country into districts to elect members of the Knesset, parties get seats according to their nationwide vote draw- and unlike Germany, there's no threshhold lower than which you can't get seats (I think in Germany it's 5%?)

Essentially, you have a few major parties, and then you have a whole bunch of seats that are controlled by far-right hawks who only got two or three percent of the vote, but they got two or three percent of the seats in the Knesset anyways. So if 45% of the Israeli public votes for center-right parties, and 45% votes for center-left parties, and 10% (mainly ultra-Orthodox, IIRC) vote for irredentist warmongers- suddenly 10% of the seats in the Knesset are composed of lunatics, and the major parties have to court them, because nobody can form a coalition without them.

[nenjin]

In other news....I love how much time, money and political willpower has been spent trying to undermine Obamacare. It's going before the Supreme Court today for the third time, this time attacking whether the law authorizes the government to provide subsidies to states that didn't set up their own exchanges. The goal being, if the law is struck down, to completely upset the insurance market and premiums so the healthcare law can't meet its objectives by providing guaranteed lower rates, and people have to go back to private insurers who can charge whatever they want for whatever broken policy they want.

I really hope history looks back and notes how the vast majority of Republican's time was spent doing nothing by intent, or tearing down laws instead of crafting new ones.

[Zangi]

Assuming that bonfire of hate-on for Israel isn't being fed... and then using the bonfire as an excuse to feed it more...

FTFY
Sure, certain groups within the US wants to destroy Iran(perhaps at the behest of Israel, cause they can do no wrong), but they ain't the ones currently in control of foreign policy.  Of course, that may change later...

Any sort of US military engagement to protect Israel from Iran would pretty much be perceived as us achieving what we want as well (other than protecting Israel.) It's hard to say you don't have a vested interest in an outcome when you're attacking an entire country. And depending on who wins the election, the desire to attack Iran might go from right-wing crackpot saber rattling to US Foreign Policy.

It ain't Merica trying to convince other peoplethe US to go do another overly optimistic gung-ho regime change though. 

So yea, negotiations, from what I hear of the news say there is actual progress.  It won't surprise me too much if Merica does start sounding the drumbeat of war.  Of course, after sabotagingtacking on everything Israel wants to the negotiations then say that Iran is being unreasonablemust be crushed before they get nukes when it ultimately falls apart.

When it comes to Israel... US Politicians in a general sense are collectively the equivalent of a dog.  Israel's Government is the human.

[nenjin]

It ain't Merica trying to convince other peoplethe US to go do another overly optimistic gung-ho regime change though.

When you're the muscle behind the attempt, you don't really get to deny involvement in the end goal. You don't drop billions of dollars in military expenditures and just go "Oh, it's a favor to Israel, we don't actually share their goals." Even if that's how we felt domestically, internationally, the perception would be much different. No one believes the US when we say why we're doing something, anyways.

Also, Republicans are currently trying to ram through legislation that would require congressional approval of any deal struck with Iran, and that they'd want two to three months to evaluate the specifics, before telling the president to go fuck himself.

[FearfulJesuit]

In other news....I love how much time, money and political willpower has been spent trying to undermine Obamacare. I really hope history looks back and notes how the vast majority of Republican's time was spent doing nothing by intent, or tearing down laws instead of crafting new ones.

I think we're going to look back and look at the whole Obamacare debacle as a piece of brilliant chessplaying on Obama's part, just like executive-ordered immigration reform. Several million people now have health insurance under the law, and if it suddenly falls out from beneath them, there'll be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Sure, go ahead and destroy the law if you want to...but beware the fallout.

It's the same with immigration reform. It didn't grant amnesty to people who could have been gone en masse at any minute- it just recognized the existing situation. The GOP thinks Obamacare and immigration reform are a nightmare. Maybe they are or maybe they ain't, but the Republicans will find themselves in a much worse nightmare if they ever succeed in undoing them.

(A few members of the GOP's more level-headed faction, like Lindsay Graham and Jeb Bush, recognize this and just want to move on. Hopefully their numbers will grow.)

[mainiac]

What the republicans really need to do is keep enough FUD around so that the benefits of the law dont win the democrats any goodwill.  This they have essentially accomplished.

[RedKing]

What the republicans really need to do is keep enough FUD around so that the benefits of the law dont win the democrats any goodwill.  This they have essentially accomplished.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=FUD

That...would certainly be an interesting political tactic. 

[nenjin]

Yeah, I had to look that one up too.

[RedKing]

I like my version better. 

[mainiac]

In case anyone is wondering, I meant Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.

[SalmonGod]

Hey Redking... did you catch this?

I've seen it reported through sensationalist articles that this is basically giving lobbyists permission to buy prostitutes for politicians.  It doesn't seem to actually read that way.  But it does say that so long as the participants in question aren't registered as lobbyist, and not being paid by someone registered as a lobbyist, that "consensual sexual relations" do not constitute a form of gift or goodwill act which needs to be reported.

If nothing else, it's amusing that this ruling was requested.  And I'm sure there will be people who try to stretch the wording provided to the loosest possible interpretations.

[Darvi]

"I will start my own lobby! Maybe not with blackjack, but there will definitively be hookers!"

[FearfulJesuit]

Glad to see them family values are alive and well on Capitol Hill.

[Frumple]

And I'm sure there will be people who try to stretch the wording provided to the loosest possible interpretations.

... the wording there was intentional, wasn't it.