Category Archives: Conflict

UPDATED: Fiscal Cliff Cadenza* Simplified (‘Cuts’ In Spending-Rate Increases)

Conflict, Debt, Democrats, Economy, Law, Republicans

Cuts to designated increases in federal spending: that’s all the “spending cuts” or “budget sequestration” portion of the fiscal cliff cadenza amount to.

These cuts were mandated by a law, The Budget Control Act of 2011, enacted by our miserable legislators. They now refuse to abide by this meager law.

The media, lying simpletons that they are, are framing the government-cutting component of the fiscal free-fall as a catastrophe.

Whoever believes that cuts to the rate of government growth would be catastrophic should fry.

For good measure, the same mind-fucking media are using phrases such as “Congressional stubbornness” as proxies for Republican recalcitrance.

The next component in the fiscal-cliff equation, or The Budget Control Act of 2011, are tax hikes. The Bush tax cuts will sunset, as will the temporary payroll tax cuts and certain tax breaks for businesses. Also to take effect are taxes tied to President Obama’s health-care behemoth.

As I understand it, in addition to their refusal to consider any cuts in spending rates, Democrats are insisting on replacing the tax raising provisions of the law with tax hikes on The Rich.

The mindless masses (and the pea brains of Hollywood), however, are already against Congress, which, for all its timidity also stands accused, preemptively, of failing to raise “the national borrowing limit.”

What are the Democrats doing? Put in Charlie Sheen speak, they are “Winning.”

* Cadenza: South African informal for a fit or convulsion

UPDATE (12/29/012): ‘Cuts’ In Spending-Rate Increases.

Finally, Republicans and a couple of Democrats and their anointed experts are framing all budget proposals out there as they should: “cuts to designated increases in spending.”

Via Bret Baier:

With the government spending roughly $10 billion a day, the cuts that are being proposed wouldn’t even cover the interest on the debt.
Spending is not projected to go down. At best, the rate of growth in spending would slow.
“The word ‘cut’ is what government statisticians and budget officials call it — but in fact it’s just really a slowing of growth, and sometimes the growth is still quite high even after it’s slowed down,” said John Taylor, a Stanford University economist.
“They assume that if this year we spend 5 percent, next year we’re gonna spend 8 percent, and the year after that we’re gonna spend 10 percent. And they say ‘well I’ll tell you what, why don’t we cut a percentage point off each one of those rates of growth?’ … Well, that’s not a cut.”
Former Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh noted that “no family, no business, no philanthropy” would operate that way.
“I think there are some passages in Alice in Wonderland that must have dealt with this, because in Washington less of an increase is considered a cut, even though it’s more money…”

UPDATED: Snarling Sister Is Back, In Time for Halloween (Winnie Mandela/Madam Obama)

Affirmative Action, Barack Obama, Conflict, Critique, Politics, Racism

Michelle Obama has managed to lie low since the times I described her as “Militant Mama Obama” (February 22, 2008). In that column, I ventured that, “If anything, her charmed life has made Michelle Obama more racially militant.” As the woman complained in a blatantly banal university thesis, “My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‘blackness’ than ever before.”

But she’s back!

The Washington Times has details of the strategy undergirding M’s latest moaning:

… She will go to the opulent homes of rich people across the country to tell them how rich people are to blame for America’s woes and guilt them into giving millions for her husband’s campaign. … [How] rich people (white, of course) certainly don’t want black people to succeed. They want to squelch success based on what people look like, how much money they have. … And the Princeton graduate will tell supporters they simply can’t comprehend the significance of what’s occurring today in America. ‘It can be hard to see clearly what’s at stake – because these issues are so complicated …’

MORE.

Michelle Obama’s sentiments seep out from that festering reservoir of racial animosity—the same cesspool wherefrom the Reverends Sharpton and Jackson launch their perennial strikes.

UPDATE (Oct. 1): WINNIE MANDELA/MADAM OBAMA. Robert, there is a similarity in anger levels between the two women, although Winnie Madikizela-Mandela had considerable cause for anger. The woman had it tough. I mention Winnie in the book you just reviewed on Amazon. Winnie, moreover, was a looker, unlike MO. I saw Winnie in person when I attended Tutu’s inaugural with my dad. She was then drop-dead (if deadly) gorgeous. But I mean Beyonce beautiful.

Democracy In Egypt = Dar al-Islam

Christianity, Conflict, Democracy, Foreign Policy, Freedom of Religion, Middle East, Military

Remember how members of the American chattering class, libertarians too, practically tripped over one another to show-off their solidarity with the popular uprising in Egypt?

Many of the same slobbering sorts failed to mention that, when he was not ordering rendition and torture in the service of the US, Mubarak’s dictatorial powers were directed, unjustly indubitably, against the Islamic fundamentalists of the Muslim brotherhood. He kept them in check. All in all, Mubarak protected the endangered Coptic Christians of Egypt, who form “one-tenth of the 80 million people.”

So many neocons and liberals came down on Obama, his VP, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when they responded with “old-school diplomacy” to the developments on Israel’s southern border. The opposition wanted BHO to be less low key about the lovely rebels. BHO eventually complied.

PBS refuses to identify the 26 “protesters” who were killed in yesterday’s “sectarian” clashes in Egypt between Muslim and Christians. I wager that the Christian Coptic community stands less of a chance now that Mubarak is gone.

RAY SUAREZ: Some 1,000 Christians gathered last night to protest the slow response of the military government to Muslim attacks on Coptic churches, but the peaceful protest quickly grew into a melee, as Christians, Muslims and security forces battled in the streets.

DAVID KIRKPATRICK of the New York Times attests to the fact that what started as “a demonstration, a peaceful march that began in the neighborhood of Shoubra—Copts demonstrating over the attack on a church in the southern part of Egypt—“ended with “the security forces… driving a trucks into the Coptic Christian protesters and firing ammunition also at the protesters. So, today, we had bodies that were badly mangled by those vehicles and others that had those bullet wounds.”

“The Christian minority [lost] a protector in Hosni Mubarak,” admitted KIRKPATRICK.

But no. “Yesterday wasn’t a clash between Muslim and Christians, but it was led by thugs who want to stab the revolution and the political process,” said one of Egypt’s new “son of 60 dogs” (an Egyptian expression for political master).

Nice try.

Egypt, like Iraq (where Saddam kept Muslim fanaticism in check), is destined to become Dar al-Islam (House of Islam)

The heyday for Iraq’s Christian community was under Saddam Hussein, when “Catholics made up 2.89 percent of Iraq’s population in 1980. By 2008,” thanks to the Bush pig, “they were merely 0.89 percent.” Iraq’s “dwindling Christian community,” “whose numbers have plummeted since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion as the community has fled to other countries,” has suffered a terrible loss today.

UPDATED: NATO Socks It To The Serbs, For a Change

America, BAB's A List, Conflict, Democracy, Foreign Policy, Israel, Judaism & Jews

NATO Socks It To The Serbs, For a Change
By Nebojsa Malic

MORE THAN A DOZEN civilians were injured when NATO troops opened fire on Serb protesters in northern Kosovo on Tuesday. The Serbs had been peacefully protesting NATO’s seizure of checkpoints on the roads to the rest of Serbia, seeking to enforce the writ of the self-proclaimed Albanian government “in the entire country” (Kosovo’s Albanians declared an independent state with NATO support in 2008; Serbia, along with most of the world, refuses to recognize it). Western media reported this as “clashes.” NATO spokespeople argued they’d used only rubber bullets, in “self-defense.” Video and eyewitness reports prove them wrong.

NATO occupied Kosovo in 1999, after an illegal war in support of the separatist Albanian “Liberation Army.” Evidence of alleged Serb atrocities – used to justify the war – never materialized. Albanian persecution of ethnic Serbs and other communities, meanwhile, has unfolded for 12 years now, under the very noses of the “peacekeepers” and often with their tacit approval. When Serbia acted to establish law and order in Kosovo in 1998, it was condemned by NATO as “aggressor” and its actions deemed “genocide.” But when NATO initiates violence on behalf of a criminal regime of ethnic cleansers, slavers, drug-runners and organ harvesters, they call it “law and order” and anyone who opposes it, no matter how peacefully, a “criminal element.”

Why should any of this matter? Because it shows the world’s dominant military power (for now) as dangerously and deliberately disconnected from logic, and hence justice.

In the early 1990s, a media image of the Balkans wars was created in the West, wherein the Serbs were these mass-murdering aggressors against their peaceful neighbors, and the virtuous West had to step in and stop them. The Serbs were accused of the most vicious atrocities and compared to the Nazis.

None of that makes any sense. The Serbs are accused of breaking up Yugoslavia – yet they wanted to preserve it (and even then, not at all costs). The West decided that Yugoslavia had ceased to exist (just like that) and that the borders of its federal units were inviolable – except for Serbia, which could be carved up further (Kosovo). Serbs in Croatia were denied autonomy and expelled en masse, but Albanians in Serbia were given independence. Serbs in Bosnia were told they had to submit to a centralized, Muslim-dominated state, while Serbia itself was ordered to de-centralize to the point of separatism. No matter which way one turns, the only consistent “principle” in the Orwellian Balkans is that the Serbs always lose.

The Nazi comparison is especially vile, considering that 1) the Serbs were the principal targets of Nazis and their allies during WW2, and had also fought German and Austrian aggression in WW1; 2) Croats, Bosnian Muslims and Albanians were allied with the Nazis in WW2, and the first two fought for Austria-Hungary in WW1, and 3) both Croats and Albanians had designs for eliminating the Serbs from the territories they claimed, and put those plans into effect under Western patronage, while the Serbs were accused of genocide without any evidence of intent!

One PR executive even bragged, as early as 1993, that the biggest coup of his agency was convincing the Jewish public opinion in the West that the Serbs were Nazis reborn, even though Croats and Bosnian Muslims had a history of “real and cruel anti-Semitism”!

In the course of the Balkans interventions, the West has repeatedly violated its own laws and charters (NATO), making a mockery of the UN and international law, while claiming to be guided by some sort of higher morality. The result of these interventions was that the US, Britain and France betrayed an ally from two world wars and demonized them as Nazis reborn, while supporting Germany and aiding German allies from WW2 to finish what they started in 1941. If this sort of stunning reversal can happen in the Balkans, it can happen anywhere else. To anyone else.

First come the smears. Then the bombs. Then the boots on the ground, and the desert called peace.

You have been warned.

****
Nebojsa Malic has been the Balkans columnist for Antiwar.com since 2000, and blogs at grayfalcon.blogspot.com. This editorial is exclusive to Barely A Blog.

UPDATE: BAB contributor Nebojsa Malic on Russia Today, TODAY. The neocon is always and everywhere the most uncivilized: