Eideard

If you don’t stick to the script I’ll let Cheney have you!

BONN, Germany — As dozens of nations and organizations met here on Monday to plan a transition beyond the withdrawal of American and other international forces from Afghanistan in 2014, the Afghan government had a new deadline in mind: 2024.

President Hamid Karzai and other Afghan officials here called for political and military support for at least another decade — and financial assistance that would not end until 2030. That would be nearly three decades after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 that led to the international intervention in Afghanistan.

While Mr. Karzai and others celebrated the strides made in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban — 60 percent of Afghans now have mobile phones, he said, compared to none — the conference highlighted the multiple challenges facing a fragile government undermined by corruption and threatened by a resilient insurgency…

Instead, as the months have passed, the tempo of the war has shown little sign of winding down, despite an optimistic assessment from NATO that it had reversed the momentum of the Taliban insurgents…

Even though President Obama and other NATO leaders created a timetable for withdrawal by 2014, few officials now expect any reconciliation talks to even begin by then. That has raised questions about security and the stability of Mr. Karzai’s government once international troops steadily begin to withdraw.

Mr. Karzai’s government presented a paper to the conference outlining Afghanistan’s plans for developing an economy now almost entirely dependent on international military and development spending…

…Just meeting the cost of Afghanistan’s military forces — which by 2014 are expected to total 400,000 soldiers — is estimated to cost $3.5 billion to $6 billion a year. By then, Afghanistan, the world’s 40th largest country, would have the world’s 12th largest military.

Thanks, George.

Please, let us remember come Election Day how many lies we listened to over the years from the cesspool of corruption that is political Washington.

President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign is having some fun — and raising some money — from a flap over whether Obama was born in the United States.

The Obama campaign is offering a “Made in the USA” T-shirt emblazoned with the president’s birth certificate in exchange for a $30 donation. There are coffee mugs as well.

Some Republicans [and other dipshits] have theorized Obama was born in Kenya, birthplace of his father, instead of Hawaii.

Obama ignored the accusations until wealthy real estate magnate Donald Trump made the “birther” issue a central part of his campaign to decide whether to challenge Obama in 2012. The U.S. Constitution requires the American president to be born in the United States.

With a sizable percentage of Americans expressing doubts about Obama’s birthplace, Obama last month produced a longer version of his birth certificate that confirmed he was born at a Honolulu hospital in 1961…

The issue has since ebbed and Trump this week opted against a campaign for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

“If the facts can’t make these ridiculous smears go away, we can at least have a little fun with it,” deputy campaign manager Julianna Smoot said in an email to supporters.

One of the best ways to handle populist dullards and their conspiracy cousins is laughter. Turning that laughter into a fund-raising tool – makes it worth even more. You get to laugh at these clowns while helping the 2012 campaign of the Black man they hate the most.

“If I were dead, would I be sitting here playing with my iPad?”

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Where is the death certificate?? Why are they hiding the death certificate??
The post title speaks for itself. I rest my case.

Tea, anyone?

As a democratic revolution led by tech-empowered young people sweeps the Arab world, Wadah Khanfar, Al Jazeera’s director-general, shares a profoundly optimistic view of what’s happening in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and beyond.

In the first talk posted online from the TED 2011 conference in California, Khanfar describes the powerful moment when people realised they could step out of their homes and ask for change.

President Obama, Congress and the lamebrains in our wonderful world of news as entertainment – all say the waves of revolt sweeping the Middle East and North Africa came as a great surprise. If they watched AlJazeera – if it was allowed the same access to cable and satellite broadcasts as white-bread TV news – they would have been prepared, knowledgeable and not surprised in the least.

Knowledge and truth still aren’t leading commodities in American government or telecommunications.

Gay rights activists are celebrating another step forward after the Obama administration announced it would no longer defend legislation that defines marriage as between a man and a woman.

The decision opens the way for the federal government to recognise same-sex marriages. It comes only three months after the White House said it would end legislation discriminating against gay men and lesbians in the military.

Eight US states permit same-sex marriages but these are not recognised by the federal government, which does afford these couples the same treatment as heterosexual couples in terms of taxation, health benefits and in other areas.

The Obama administration said on Wednesday it would no longer ask the justice department to defend the 1996 Defence of Marriage Act in court.

The decision will spark another row with social conservatives, who are almost certain to challenge it in court.

The White House press spokesman, Jay Carney…said the president did not believe the law was constitutional, though his personal view on gay marriage was still evolving. “He’s grappling with the issue,” Carney. “But I want to make a distinction between his personal views” and the legal decision not to defend the law…

A federal judge in Massachusetts last year ruled the act unconstitutional.

Only a fool would expect the entire course of United States history to be reversed for long on issues of civil rights. What will be achieved by Republicans and their assorted flunkies is further polarization of those who vote – and more important – revitalization of those who don’t often vote.

Questions of principle, especially principles of democracy and equal opportunity serve best to activate fence-sitters and those suffering political ennui for whatever reason. Certainly better than rote recitation of 14th Century ideology by squads of disaffected bumpkins – already recognized as backwards enough to be the butt of TV comedy.

Any teabaggers ever join an anti-war demonstration?

After two years of struggling to balance the rights of patients against the beliefs of health-care workers, the Obama administration on Friday finally rescinded most of a federal regulation designed to protect those who refuse to provide care they find objectionable on moral or religious grounds.

The decision guts one of President George W. Bush’s most controversial legacies: a rule that was widely interpreted as shielding workers who refuse to participate in a range of medical services, such as providing birth control pills, caring for gay men with AIDS and performing in-vitro fertilization for lesbians or single women.

Friday’s move was seen as an important step in countering that trend, which in recent years had led pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions for the emergency contraceptive Plan B, doctors in California to reject a lesbian’s request for infertility treatment, and an ambulance driver in Chicago to turn away a woman who needed transportation for an abortion.

“Without the rescission of this regulation, we would see tremendous discrimination against patients based on their behavior and based just on who they are,” said Susan Berke Fogel of the National Health Law Program, an advocacy group based in the District. “We would see real people suffer, and more women could die.”

The new rule leaves intact only long-standing “conscience” protections for doctors and nurses who do not want to perform abortions or sterilizations. It also retains the process for allowing health workers whose rights are violated to file complaints.

You wouldn’t ask Republicans, teabaggers and other hypocrites to give up on the Death Panels they already support, would you?

Last night, the only place to be was at king-of-all-venture-capitalists John Doerr’s house in Woodside, California, where President Barack Obama sat down with none other than Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Yahoo’s Carol Bartz and a handful of other billionaire tech titans.

The White House Flickr feed shared the above image, taken by Pete Souza, identifying these people only as “Technology Business Leaders,” though bloggers made small work of attaching names to faces. According to the the New York Times political blog, The Caucus, the remaining folks in the shot are: Cisco’s John Chambers, Twitter’s Dick Costolo, Netflix’s Reed Hastings, Stanford University president John Hennessy, Genentech’s Art Levinson and “cleantech” entrepreneur Steve Westly.

And a good time was had by all.

Republican Free Market version of a modern railroad

Vice President Joe Biden has announced an ambitious $53 billion U.S. program to build new high-speed rail networks and make existing ones faster over the next six years.

But the plan drew immediate fire from majority Republicans in the House of Representatives, who said building high-speed rail requires private investment rather than a government plan…

The ideological response doesn’t matter. They may as well have said their favorite Wall Street astrologer gets the whim-whams on train rides. They oppose the plan [1] because it’s a Democrat plan; [2] Obama probably thought of it; [3] it doesn’t especially increase profits for Big Oil.

“This is about seizing the future,” he said, making the announcement at Philadelphia’s busy 30th Street station with U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.

The United States should follow the example of Japan and China and build high-speed rail, Biden said. “If we do not, you tell me how America is going to be able to lead the world in the 21st century,” he said…

Advocates say U.S. investment in high-speed rail lags many other countries and point to China, which plans to invest $451 billion to $602 billion in its high-speed rail network between 2011 and 2015, according to the China Securities Journal.

China turned the portion of the Great Recession that affected their economy into an opportunity to expand and modernize infrastructure. This provided hundreds of thousands of jobs for unskilled workers and is laying the groundwork for an internal logistics system completely independent of highways.

The rest of the world gets to look at these questions and how they’re managed in nations with sensible infrastructure vs. the United States and the answers are easy. Rapid freight movement involves trucks and air. Serious freight movement involves rail. Passenger travel can involve rail, road and air. The United States offers the worst case examples for modern solutions.

No – I’m not suggesting you print this out and sell it on your own

Five Hawaii Democratic state legislators have introduced a bill that would allow anyone seeking an original, certified copy of Barack Obama’s birth record to obtain one — for $110.

The measure, introduced in the state legislature last week, would change a state law that currently limits the release of vital documents to persons with a “direct and tangible interest,” such as family members.

“I’m hoping that it will also reduce the number of calls that we get and calm the birthers down,” said the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Rida Cabanilla, in an interview. “It may to a certain extent reduce the conspiracy theories, but at least the fee might reduce the number of frivolous calls asking for explanations about why a copy cannot be released.”

The Obama campaign released an electronic copy of his “certification of live birth” in 2008. But it didn’t quiet skeptics who insist, without evidence, that Obama was born in Kenya. They have flooded phone lines at Hawaii’s health department with hundreds of requests for access to original documents.

The certified copy lists the date, hour and location of Obama’s birth, as well as the names and races of his parents. It includes an embossed seal of authenticity from the Department of Health, according to images posted online.

Cabanilla’s bill would allow anyone to receive a physical copy of that certification for a fee…

“Those records are very fragile and are kept in a state vault. They shouldn’t be released or exposed to the elements,” said Cabanilla. “We’re hoping providing people access to the certified copy will quiet them down.”

Which is as absurd as explaining the world is round to some of the same crowd in the KoolAid Party.

Nutballs convinced of one or another conspiracy theory are perfectly religious, no different from any other apocalyptic sect, in that they see no science, reason or material fact able to dissuade their True Belief. All the rest of reality must be wrong.

Just in case you hadn’t noticed. This was one of the central events in the press conference with President Hu and President Obama.