And how does threating Israel help halt settlements? Israelis, when threatened, tend to stick together; that means the worse things are, the *more *people here tend to sympathize with the settlers. You want us to make progress? Make sure we feel secure enough to argue among ourselves.
Are you saying it’s incumbent upon the U.S. to take certain steps to induce Israel to stop the settlements? If the settlements piss off her neighbors, why can’t Israel stop on her own? Wouldn’t that help improve the security situation?
No, I’m saying that Iranian nukes will not prevent Israel from building in settlements - in fact, they’ll probably have the opposite effect.
Well, it doesn’t evidently, but it is not hard for me to see how people outside of Israel see the settlements as ongoing bad faith, and feel thusly that threats are justified. While doubtless counter-productive (as are the settlements), the reaction is not impossible to grasp.
If you Sam had thrown in there Obama’s human rights dismal record on Don 't Ask, Don’t Tell and Defense of Marriage Act right here in the USA I would have been impressed.
And personally, I have gained a lot from Buddhism in terms of living my life. I am not necessarily a Buddhist as there are som e things I don’t follow or agree with. But I really do find it odd that AT is so anti-Dalia Llama. he keeps asking what has he ever done? I ask the same thing, only from the persepective, what has he ever done to deserve such derision?
I didn’t say that.
OTOH, you did say the things that Lightnin’ quoted you as saying.
I’d be happy to, but we’d already covered that ground. But yes, Obama’s lack of defense for gay marriage is also a strike against him, as is his new-found love of executive privilege, signing statements, and lack of transparency. The guy who campaigned on creating the most open, transparent government ever has turned out to be a guy who is appointing numerous ‘czars’ who don’t have to report to Congress, who has dropped his pledge to put bills online for seven days before signing them, and who has now embraced Bush’s concept of executive privilege in regards to the need to turn documents over when requested.
But now a bit of a mea culpa on my part:
I gave this a fair bit of thought today, and it made me realize I’ve been somewhat unfair and too willing to jump to the worst conclusions about some of Obama’s foreign policy. I have to accept that some of the things he’s done which I would disagree with in isolation may in fact be part of a larger strategy that is still being unveiled. God knows I’ve criticized people in the past who knee-jerked their way to the most negative, most simplistic interpretation of every foreign policy action of Bush’s or Reagan’s, and at least in the case of Reagan history has shown that there was a hell of a lot more going on behind the scenes than we ever knew.
Getting back to Obama, I read an article today about Netanyahu’s trip to Russia, where he supposedly presented the Russians with a list of Russian scientists who have been helping Iran with its nuclear program. The U.S. also leaked a document which indicated Russian shenanigans. So it is possible that there is in fact some kind of backchannel diplomacy going on here, and that the public moves we’ve been seeing are only a small part of it.
Therefore, it’s only reasonable to withhold judgment until we get more information about what’s really going on. It may be that some of Obama’s recent overtures to Russia and Iran and the U.N. may be laying groundwork for getting the world community on board with tough sanctions, and the coordinated leaking of intel about Russia could be boxing them in so they have to go along. We’ll see.
Has Obama created any czar positions? He might have made one but as far as I know the positions have been there for a while he just selected replacements.
‘Czar’ positions have been around for a long time, but until George Bush, most presidents only had a handful of them. For example, Bill Clinton had 7 ‘czar’ positions: AIDS Czar, Border Czar, Climate Czar, Drug Czar, e-Commerce Czar, Anti-terrorism Czar, and ‘Czar Czar’. These are really alternate titles for official positions created at the President’s behest - they are not the same from administration to administration. For example, the ‘Czar Czar’ was actually “Chief domestic policy advisor and Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council.”
Until Bush, these positions were generally fairly innocuous advisory positions. They were widely publicized and fairly transparent. Bush blew the whole Czar thing open, creating 31 different ‘czar’ positions (‘abstinence czar’, etc). It was one of the things that got Bush nailed for not running a transparent administration, and it was a criticism I agreed with.
So in 8 years, Bush created 31 ‘czar’ positions. So far, Obama has created 32 ‘Czar’ positions in his first nine months. A few of them were pre-existing, but others are brand new (“Green Jobs Czar”, “IT Technology Czar”).
Again, there is no formal position called ‘Czar’ - it’s basically a shorthand term for a person given a director-level job appointed by the president. Because mostly they are presidential appointees not of cabinet rank, there are no requirements for them to report their activities to Congress.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing - there have been ‘czars’ since the Truman administration. But the worry of many in Congress is that the rapidly increasing number of them is creating an awful lot of executive activity that is beyond Congressional oversight. I do believe it’s a bipartisan concern - Democrats had a problem with it when Bush did it, and Republicans have a problem with it now.
According to Wikipedia (sorry, awful source, but the best I can do before the morning caffeine), Bush had 31 versus Obama’s 32 czars. Not a real huge difference. Granted, Obama’s been in office a much shorter time, but it seems as though there were several “carryovers” from his predecessor’s tenure.
According to Wikipedia (sorry, awful source, but the best I can do before the morning caffeine), Bush had 31 versus Obama’s 32 czars. Not a real huge difference. Granted, Obama’s been in office a much shorter time, but it seems as though there were several “carryovers” from his predecessor’s tenure. A quick perusal only indicates that three of the Czars are new posts- most are positions created by Bush, which were filled by Obama appointees when he took office.
Bush created *many *more new Czar positions.
Thinking before posting might be an idea you should consider as well…
Czars have no executive power, so who cares how many they are? All they are is advisors. Why should Congress have any say on what kind of advice the President is allowed to listen to?
For example, choosing to post a gratuitious insult in Great Debates where it doesn’t belong?
Really? So you didn’t have a problem when Bush’s Czars met with various unknown industry executives when helping to formulate policy? I seem to recall the left making a big damned deal out of that. In fact, Bush had to invoke executive privilege to prevent the list of ‘industry advisors’ from being made public.
It’s the process itself that lacks transparency when policy is formulated behind closed doors. You don’t know which lobbyists are pulling strings, which industries are being paid off, which options were considered and abandoned at the behest of special interests. Saying there’s no problem with this is like saying there’s no problem with lobbyists have unlimited access to the President and being asked to help draft laws. After all, they don’t have any statutory authority, so what’s the harm?
You want the debate out in the open. You want options weighed in public where everyone can see the process and judge for themselves how much influence special interests have. The only time this stuff should be opaque is when there are national secrets that must be wittheld for security purposes.
Again, this is not a right wing/left wing issue. Democrats made all of these points during the last administration. And ‘good government’ watchdogs on both the right and the left had problems with the Bush Administration’s lack of transparency - as did Obama himself. He ran against it. Open government and complete transparency of the process were election promises he made. Remember?
The policy still came from Bush, not the Czars, so no. I don’t really care what particular minions he used to communicate with his corporate masters. They don’t make policy.
I remember the big deal made about Cheney’s meeting with oil industry types, but was there a czar that created the same concern?
What’s the difference? by Diogenes’ logic, the oil industry types don’t have statutory authority, so who cares if they were involved in the process? What if a ‘czar’ had been the one who met with them, then relayed their desires to Cheney? The issue was that these people had the ear of the government and we didn’t know specifically who they were or what they wanted. It doesn’t matter if they talked directly to Cheney or to the 'Director of White House Oil Industry Liason" - who reports to Cheney and does what Cheney wants.
The difference between an actual and a hypothetical. And the difference between Cheney, arguably the most powerful VP in US history, and some “czar”.
The difference is that the Vice President isn’t a czar. Again you post stuff that isn’t true. And get called on it, and you just try and ignore it.
But that isn’t what happened, is it? Despite your claim that it was what happened.
But the problem you had was with “czars”, not with elected officials, so your analogy isn’t accurate, your recollection of history isn’t accurate, and your arguments come off as just so much tripe.
No insult intended. There are far, far too many times on these boards when a policy of Obama’s is slammed as an automatic knee-jerk response without giving it proper thought.
If you want gratuitous insults, that’s room 12A, just down the corridor. 